CHAPTER 1

REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORY OF

EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

CHARLES TILLY

Political Development and History

THE ANALYSIS OF political development has had about the same

relationship to historical experience as a dog on a long leash to the

tree at the other end of the leash. The dog can roam in almost any

direction. He can even get the illusion of rushing OH on his own. But

let him rush too far, too fast and his collar will jerk him back; it may

even knock the wind out of him. Some political scientists want to

break the leash or at least move the tree. The authors of this book

want, instead, a leash which is very long but very sure. Our mini-

mum position is this: major political transformations which occurred

in the past may not repeat themselves in the present and future, and

are very unlikely to repeat themselves in exactly the same way, but

any theories which claim to encompass general processes of political

transformation must be consistent with past experience, and ought

to be checked carefully against that experience before gaining wide

acceptance. We often move beyond that minimum position; we con-

sider the historical experience to be more important than contempo-

rary observation in the formulation or verification of some kinds of

generalizations about large-scale political changes.

Political analysis as a whole has never strayed far from the tree.

The French Revolution, the Athenian city-state, the Chinese bureauc-

racy have always stood as cases to be conjured with, examples to

illustrate an argument, realities against which to dash an opponent’s

theory. Since World War II, nevertheless, a number of students of

large-scale political process have sought to escape the tyranny of the

past through the employment of techniques developed in fields ori—

ented mainly to the present: survey research, international quantita—

tive analyses of data from censuses or bureaucratic reporting, and

Warm thanks to Val Lorwin, who threshed several versions of different parts of

this chapter, and found plenty of chaff ; one of those parts circulated earlier as Tilly

1970 (citations in this form refer to the bibliography at the end of the book).

[3]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

so on. The creation of scores of independent states made the swing

toward the present possible, and even pressing. It had a psychedelic

effect; it widened the vision of those whose textbooks had told them

that “comparative government” consisted mainly in the systematic

scrutiny of republican, fascist, communist, and monarchical consti—

tutions. “Political development” called attention to change, process,

emergence in the present and the future.

The move toward the dynamic analysis of the present entailed

serious costs, some of which were unavoidable. Two especially con-

cern us here. If the span of time observed is very short—either

because the states under study are new or because data are only avail-

able for one or two points in time—it will be impossible to detect

trends and to verify theories about what the trends should be. The

attempt to extrapolate the experience of Ghana, Jordan, or Jamaica

from a span of five or ten years is risk itself. And the alternative use

of international comparisons at a single point in time (assuming that

Ghana, Jordan, Jamaica, Belgium, and Israel, let us say, stand at dif-

ferent points on some continuum of political development all of them

will eventually traverse) begs the very question which theorists of

political development are struggling to answer.

The second real cost (this one avoidable in principle but neverthe-
less widespread) is the implicit introduction of misconceived models

of Western experience as the criteria of political development. Mis-

conceived, in three senses: (1) they often caricatured the Western

experience by assuming a fairly continuous rationalization of gov-

ernment, broadening of political participation, pacification of the

masses, and so on, (2) even where reasonably accurate, they skirted

the possibility that the Western experience was a lucky shot, an aber-

ration, a dead end, or simply one among many paths open to “mod-

em” government, whatever that may be; (3) the criteria of mo-

dernity tended to twist the question of paths of development into

another one: under what conditions and through what transformations

might We expect the governments of today’s new worlds to end up

looking like old-world governments?

The most profound historical analysis in the world will not turn

us into clairvoyants. Yet careful examination of the longer run of his-

torical experience will at least defend those who ardently desire to

make sense of the contemporary world and the world of the future

from the two kinds of error I have described. Indeed, we find many

political analysts who began with contemporary affairs moving back

[4]CHARLES TI LLY

to grapple with the long run: a Barrington Moore transferring his

attention from recent Soviet politics to the origins of the world’s

great political alternatives, a G. W. Skinner gliding from the Chinese

in modern Thailand to China over its vast imperial history, a Sam--

uel Huntington bounding from contemporary soldiers to the politi~

cal development of the major western powers, and numerous others

in their company.

This volume, then, may be a leap into a bandwagon already in mo-

tion. We hope, at least, that the leap will be graceful and distinctive.
Origin: of this Book

The Committee on Comparative Politics gave us a springboard

and a starting shove. That committee of the Social Science Research

Council had already helped shape the character of American studies

of large-scale political change through its patronage of inquiries

eventually published under such titles as Bureaucracy and Political

Development, C ommtmicatiom and Political Development, and The

Civic Culture. Early in 1969, the committee asked a group composed

of five of its members plus two interested outsiders—Samuel Hunt-

ington, Robert Ward, Myron Weiner, Aristide Zolberg, Gabriel Al-

mond, Rajni Kothari, and Charles Tilly—to formulate a plan of

research on state- and nation-building in Western Europe which the

committee might be able to support. The planning group recom-

mended a “workshop” for the summer of 1970. The plan was ac-

cepted; Almond and Tilly took on the chief responsibility for organ-

izing the 1970 meeting.

The general plan was straightforward: choose a diverse but inter-

locking set of activities in which all European states engaged to some

degree and whose changes and variations were crucial to the subse-

quent development of the state as a whole, persuade one or two spe-

cialists in the study of each of those activities to prepare synthetic

essays comparing the historical experience of several European

states, bring together the authors of those essays plus a few other

general analysts of political development for two months of discus-

sion of the papers, mutual criticism, further research and rewriting,

arrange a regular (but not overwhelming) flow of visiting experts

and critics. And that is what we did. The authors of this volume

were the core group. At the end of a summer’s work at the Center

for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, we were sufficiently

convinced that the work we had done was interesting (if not neces-

[5]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

sarily valid or definitive) that we decided to bring together the final

versions of the papers we had been discussing, plus some general

reflections on the papers, in a collective volume. Here it is.

We began our work intending to analyze state-making and the

formation of nations interdependently. As our inquiry proceeded,

we concentrated our attention increasingly on the development of

states rather than the building of nations. There were several rea-

sons for this drift. One was the greater ease with which we could ar-

rive at some working agreement on the meaning of the word “state.”

“Nation” remains one of the most puzzling and tendentious items in

the political lexicon. An ther was our early fixation on the periods

in which the primacy;j tates was still open to serious challenge;

they were not generally periods of nationalism, of mass political

identity or even of great cultural homogeneity Within the boundaries

of a state. The third was the bias in our original set of topics toward

the extractive and repressive activities of states.

The bias was deliberate. The singling out of the organization of

armed forces, taxation, policing, the control of food supply, and the

formation of technical personnel stresses activities which were dif—

ficult, costly, and often unwanted by large parts of the population.

All were essential to the creation of strong states; all are therefore

likely to tell us something important about the conditions under

which strong or weak, centralized or decentralized, stable or unsta—

ble, states come into being. Of course, other activities might have

found their way onto the same list: control of manufacturing, en-

forcement of public morality, propaganda, colonization and im-

perialism, and so on. This particular list emphasizes activities which

became important early in the state—making experience and re-

mained so for a long time, and on which there already exists a sub-

stantial body of historical work. As our work proceeded, the chief

omission which the group came to regret was the judicial system.

Because courts, judges, and judicial proceedings antedate national

states and appear in so many unstately guises, it is easy to forget how

large a part certain kinds of courts played in the day-to-day con-

struction of Western states. The issue comes up, of course, in papers

dealing with taxation, food supply or policing, but the volume as a

whole treats the judicial system much less adequately than we would

have liked.

Another deliberate decision significantly affected the character of

our work, and of this book. We might have asked our specialists to

write their papers as commentaries on some particular set of theories

[6]CHARLES TI LLY

concerning political change. That would have focused our joint in-

quiry from the very beginning. It would, however, have risked fixing

the inquiry on invalid schemes, on problems of terminology, on is-

sues which missed the substance of the phenomena we were trying-

to understand. Instead, each participant received the invitation to

write about his subject as best he knew how, so long as the treatment

was synthetic and comparative. (Regardless of native language, inci-

dentally, each participant prepared his contribution in English; where

that produced obscurities, I tried to edit the language into compre-

hensible—but not always idiomatic—English.)

Even the time span was left open. As it worked out, the greatest

part of our collective effort went into the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries. An earlier focus would have produced more discussions of

the antecedents of full~fledged states than this book contains; a later

one would have weighted the discussion toward the accumulation

of functions and powers by established states, and the collaboration

among existing states in drawing the rest of the world into a system

of states. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century focus has us deal—

ing with periods in which, for most of Europe, both the primacy and

the ultimate form of the state were much in doubt. Perhaps that is

the most important historical insight the book has to offer: as seen

from 1600 or so, the development of the state was very contingent;

many aspiring states crumpled and fell along the way.

Of course, all of the participants were aware of open issues in the-

ories of political change to which our conclusions might be relevant;

our summer’s discussion reinforced that awareness. But the freedom

to set each problem in its own terms surely made the individual con-

tributions more valuable, as well as more variable, than they would

have been if they had concentrated on a few available general schemes.

The Nature of the Evidence

The materials with which we work in this book will have a spuri-

ous familiarity for many a political analyst. They will remind him of

faded lecture notes on old constitutions and older states. Yet very

few of our readers will currently be attempting to confront theories

of political development with systematically assembled historical

data. Even fewer will ever have worked firsthand with the actual

documents left behind by state-making, as opposed to the standard

accounts of state-making bequeathed to us by political historians. In

dealing with the broad topics assigned to them, all of our authors

have, as one would expect, relied heavily on syntheses prepared by

[7]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-'MAKING

other scholars. In our own routine work, we vary greatly in our use

of primary historical sources. Yet in one way or another all of 115——

readers and writers alike—are ultimately prisoners of the docu—

ments. And the chains are hard to see.

The character of the evidence now available concerning the state-

building of two or three centuries ago sets important limits on our

ability to frame or validate hypotheses about political development.

We must rely mainly on the residues of the papemork carried on as

part of the very construction of the states we are studying. Because

of the way such records are produced and preserved, the residues

overrepresent the final, official, legal, organization, public sides of

the affair; we shall always be hard-pressed to find adequate docu-

mentation on the preliminary, unoflicial, illegal, informal, immoral,

and private aspects of state-making. To the extent that our argu-

ments require reliable evidence on the attitudes and intentions of

state-makers or citizens, we are bound to be disappointed. What is

more, before the nineteenth century the more or less continuous and

comprehensive description of the base population now provided by

censuses, surveys, and the like is only available for occasional small

fragments of time and space; such simple operations as calculating

per mpita government revenues by region thereby become difficult

or impossible.

As compared with historians of the family or of popular culture,

nevertheless, we are in a privileged position. For state-makers are

papermongers, their files become our archives. From I 500 onward

the documentation becomes ever more abundant. By the nineteenth

century it is almost inconceivable that a single person could master

in his lifetime the whole range of documentary evidence available

for more than ten or twenty years of any important European state’s

operation.
The documentary residues of state-making fall into several dis-

tinct categories. For convenience, we might distinguish among (1)

direct inside reporting of the conduct of public affairs, (2) routine

by-products of organizational work, and (3) records and reports of

interactions between governments and members of the general pop-

ulation. Administrative correspondence bulks largest in the first

category, both in volume and in value; few sources can give a more

rapid and dramatic sense of the problems and preoccupations of

state-makers than the exchanges between a Richelieu and his provin-

cial agents. The memoirs, journals, and personal correspondence of

[8]CHARLES TI LLY

statesmen (which are rarer, less accessible and harder to interpret

than administrative correspondence) also belong here.

The routine by-products of organizational work include some

direct inside reporting, to be sure, but they also include a variety of

materials which must be systematically collated and reinterpreted

before they yield reliable information on how the government did

its work. In Western Europe, the largest stores of this kind are rec-

ords of taxation and registration, personnel files, budgets and finan-

cial materials, and the residues of policing and judicial proceedings.

The records and reports of interactions between governments and

members of the general population overlap with the routine organ-

izational by-products, since a major part of governmental activity

consists of such things as collecting taxes from individuals, register—

ing births, drafting young men, arresting them or verifying their

claims for public assistance. Yet a wide range of relevant documents

come into existence outside the bureaucracy: the routine papers of

other organizations (firms, monasteries, municipalities, guilds, politi-

cal associations) which have to deal with the state, the reports of
travelers or other outsiders, like the British consuls whose detailed

dispatches to London are prime sources for the study of eighteenth-

century Italy, the memoirs, journals, and correspondence of individ-

uals outside the government.

With sources as varied as these, an energetic investigator can find

documentation of a great range of state-building activities. Yet the

nature of the sources sets some interesting constraints on his work.

I. have already mentioned the difliculty of verifying arguments

emphasizing attitudes and intentions with this sort of documenta-

tion. The analyst who wishes to get at organizational structure in any

but the most formal sense finds himself in a rather different bind:

the residues of routine organizational activity are abundant and in-

formative, but their very interpretation requires us to adopt unveri—

fied assumptions about how the documents came into existence,

which are in fact assumptions about how the organization operated.

(I have repeatedly run across this problem in using nineteenth-

century French police records to study collective violence and gov—

ernmental repression—two phenomena which overlap with each

other more than one might think.)

The great bulk of the documentary sources, furthermore, do not

comprise descriptive testimony in the sense that an eye—witness re-

port describes a crime, they are residues of organizational work re-

[9]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

sembling the files of any of us who spends part of his time in bu-

reaucracies. Expenditure records provide an excellent example:

properly verified and compiled, they describe a major feature of an

organization’s behavior, but only rarely do they include anything

like a narrative of the way the expenditure came about, and the veri—

fication and the compilation themselves require a theory of how the

organization behaves, if only in the form of guesses about what was

disguised or left out. Willy-nilly the historian constructs the history

of his sources and of the organizations producing his sources as he

reconstructs the phenomena he was pursuing in the first place.

Of course, something like this happens in many other branches of

historical inquiry. The student of state-making faces the problem

with particular acuteness because the organization he is tracing has

itself been the principal accumulator of the sources available to him.

The correctives are obvious but diflicult: the cross-checking of

sources drawn from different positions inside and outside the state,

the deliberate bringing to light and testing of implicit hypotheses

about the organization’s behavior, the devising of internal consist-

ency checks, and so on.

This heady difficulty concerns us here because it means that even

in the best of circumstances the comparisons we make between two

different states (or between the same state at different points in

time) will never quite permit us to distinguish between variations

in recordkeeping and variations in the phenomena the records are

supposed to reveal. A reader who looks between the lines will notice

the difliculty again and again as he goes through this book: in our at-

tempts to judge the relative extent of market production in different

periods and places, in our efforts to compare levels of government

income and CXpenditure, in our encounters With the varying repres-

siveness of different regimes, in our estimates of the redistributive

effects of different systems of taxation. We are inclined to think that

similar difliculties beset attempts to compare the current experi-

ences of twentieth-century states; they are not peculiar to historical

analysis. We are also inclined to think that the advantage of having

long spans of time to study outweighs the disadvantages of uncertain

comparability.

In the last analysis, the suitability of large historical comparisons

for the verification, falsification, and elaboration of theoriesof politi-

cal development depends on the scopes of the theories in question.

Very general theories about long-term development (like those of

[10]CHARLES TILLY

Marx, Weber, or Schumpeter) are ripe for historical criticism; they

are indeed diflicult to test in any other way. Theories of short—run

process in contemporary states, like the party-and—interest-group

analyses of V. 0. Key, Maurice Duverger or Alessandro Pizzorno, by '

contrast, do not lend themselves to the same sort of testing very well.

That much is obvious. The interesting case is the establishment of

hypothetical relationships among major variables: public liberties

as a function of bourgeois dominance, political instability as a func-

tion of autonomous military power, the relative bulk of the govern-

ment’s fiscal apparatus as an inverse function of the commercializa-

tion of the economy, and so on. Political scientists have customarily

sought to establish such relationships through the study of variation

across numerous areas at the same point of time. Yet at the same

time the theories are commonly evolutionary, developmental,

oriented to change over time. In such cases, the cross-sectional com-

parisons hardly bear on the hypotheses which are supposedly being

tested. Data on long-run change are required.

Bruce Russett’s World Handbook of Political and Social I ridica-

tor: contains an excellent set of cases in point. Most of the handbook

consists of straightforward presentations of quantitative data. But

later sections of the book move from simple description of cor-

relations to discussions of (1) “stages” of economic and political

development, (2) changing relationships between variables, and (3)

multifactor explanations of social change, all on the basis of cross—

sectional comparisons of countries in the 19 50s. A graph of the

logarithm of “deaths from domestic group violence per 1,000,000,

I9 50-1 962” (compiled from the New York Time: Index, the New I n-

ternational Yearbook, Facts on File, and the Britannica Book of the

Year and scattered other sources) against the logarithm of per

capita Gross National Product in 1957 bears the caption “Economic

Development is Associated with Political Violence, at Least in the

Early Stages.” And the commentary runs:

This would suggest—to the extent that our cross-sectional model

provides useful insights for change over time—that underdevel—

oped nations must expect a fairly high level of civil unrest for

some time, and that very poor states should probably expect an

increase, not a decrease in domestic violence over the next few

decades. The reasons, of course, are not hard to suggest. In a

traditional society knowledge is limited, aspirations are limited,

[II]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

and expectations as to the proper activities of government are

limited. All this changes with development (Russett 1964: 307).

This passage would be worth squeezing slowly for its implicit View

of the world. For present purposes the qualification “to the extent

that our cross-sectional model provides useful insights for change

over time” is all we need extract. Insight is the most that could come

from such» comparisons, for they have no logical bearing on proposi-

tions about the consequences of change. The cross-sectional differ-

ences in deaths from domestic group violence during the 19 503 may

represent permanent differences between Western and non-Western

countries. They are compatible with a world in which collective vio-

lence is rising in every country, or falling in every country. And they

could result from the ability of the wealthy twentieth-century states

to quell dissidence within their own populations, and promote it in

poor countries. If we are to formulate essentially historical hy-

potheses, we shall have to acquire essentially historical data.

The Historical Questions

In their most general terms, all our historical questions go back to

one: what are the crucial problems and events in the emergence of

the alternative forms of Western states? That immediately raises two

issues: common properties and variations. Our attempt to discern

the common properties of state-making experiences in different parts

of Western Europe has the advantage of extensive documentation,

and the logical difficulty of the missing comparison; to really detect

the standard features of the West European development, one

would want to compare Western Europe with the state-making ex-

perience of Eastern Europe, of Asia, of the contemporary world.

That we have not done with any zeal.

Our attempt to account for variations within the European experi-

ence puts us in a somewhat stronger position, since some important

differences among, say, Spain, Prussia and England do appear; the

main risk we run is of attaching great general importance to what

are in fact minor distinctions within the same family of states, or to

divisions which are in fact quite idiosyncratic to West European de—

velopment. The outcome of the Reformation in different European

countries, for example, undoubtedly afiected subsequent political

forms rather seriously; historical peculiarity or general principle?

[12]CHARLES TI LLY

The problem of variation itself splits neatly into two parts. Part

one: What determined the principal variations in the early forms of

West European states? Part two: what difference did the character

of early state-building make to the subsequent form and substance

of political activity in one country or another?

In the first part, we are asking how it is that a centralized mon-

archy arose early in France, that the Hapsburg domains remained

fragmented into ethnic-religious units weakly subordinated to the

imperial center, that the regions from Rhine to Oder sustained such

a large number of weak principalities, and so on. In the second part,

we are asking instead in what respect the early prominence of great

landlords and military institutions in Brandenburg-Prussia affected

the chances for parliamentary democracy, what features of seven-

teenth-century Bavaria might have permitted a seer to foretell her

failure to survive the nineteenth century as an independent state,

whether the long subordination of most of Italy to outside powers

somehow determined the special character of Italian unification.

That these are enormous questions, and the standard questions of

European political history to boot, we are perfectly aware. Our only

hope of contributing to their resolution lies in the possibility that the

particular variables We have chosen to scrutinize—the variations in

the extractive, repressive, control activities of governments—operate

in a regular way, and that we have caught some of the regularity in

our formulations.

Let me return to the sorts of conclusions we have reached later.

What if we have made some sense of the Western European experi-

ence; why should anyone who is mainly interested in the twentieth-

century world outside of Europe pay any attention? For three sim-

ple reasons: (I) a large proportion of the reasoning still employed

in the analysis of contemporary political change rests implicitly on

a reading of European experience, and could therefore be proved

wrong on the basis of European evidence 5 the continued salience of

the English, French, and Russian revolutions in contemporary

analyses of revolutionary processes illustrates the point perfectly;

(2) the European historical experience, for all its special features,

is long enough, well-enough documented, and a large enough influ-

ence on the rest of the world that any systematic conclusions Which

did hold up well in the light of that experience would almost auto-

matically become plausible working hypotheses to be tried out else-

[13]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

Where, in contemporary countries the growing utility for demo-

graphic analysis of conclusions concerning the conditions for rising

or falling fertility drawn from the close examination of European

populations over long periods of time offers an attractive parallel;

and (3) conversely, ostensibly general formulations which can al—

ready be proposed to account for the contemporary world deserve

checking against the vast, well-documented European experience;

the least that could come of it would be a delimitation of the appli—

cability of such formulations.

But how we attack the European record will determine the utility

of our conclusions. Three choices appear to be crucial: between

prospective and retrospective forms of analysis, between probabilis-

tic and deterministic formulations and among the searches for recur-

rent sequences and recurrent relationships.

Prospective w. Retrospective Analysis

A retrospective analysis begins with some particular historical

condition (Within our territory the emergence of stable parliamen-

tary democracy has been a favorite item) and searches back for its

causes. Its ideal conclusion appears in something like the form “Y oc-'

curs if and only if A, B, C . . . X obtain.” A prospective analysis be-

gins With a particular historical condition and searches forward to

the alternative outcomes of that condition, with a specification of the

paths leading to each of the outcomes. Thus Aristotle tells us that

given the existence of a democratic constitution, democracy is likely

to persist if the wealthy and well-born are checked but not attacked;

that oligarchy is likely to replace it if the demagogues attempt to dis—

possess the rich; that tyranny is likely to appear if the demagogues

employ military might in overcoming their opponents; that kingship,

polity, and aristocracy are unlikely to grow from democracy in any

circumstances, and so on. The ideal formulation of a prospective ar-

gument runs “if A occurs,

W will develop if B, C, D . . . N 5

X will develop if C, D, E . . . O;

Y will develop if D, E, F . . . P.”

In the case of an ideally complete theory of a phenomenon, to be

sure, the retrospective statement will be nothing but a special case

of the prospective one made about all possible starting points, then

we will know all possible paths to W, X, and Y as well as all possible

[I4]CHARLES TI LLY

paths from A, B, and C. As a practical matter, however, retrospec-

tive investigation is unlikely to yield valid prospective conclusions,

and Vice versa. If, then, we are hoping to specify the conditions un-

der which, say, a predominantly peasant population with weak insti-’

tutions of central government produces (1) military dictatorship,

(2) parliamentary democracy, or (3) agrarian socialism, we shall

have to set our thinking into a prospective frame.

In beginning our work, we did not fully sense the tension between

retrospective and prospective ways of posing questions. That initial

uncertainty caused a good deal of trouble, some of which is still visi-

ble in the book. We began with a tendency to phrase our most gen-
eral questions retrospectively, and our detailed historical questions

prospectively.

The tension appears in the very selection of a small number of

West European states still existing in the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries for comparison. For England, France, and even Spain are

survivors of a ruthless competition in which most contenders lost.

The Europe of I 500 included some five hundred more or less inde-

pendent political units, the Europe of 1900 about twenty-five. The

German state did not exist in I 500, or even 1800. Comparing the his—

tories of France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, and England '( or, for

that matter, any other set of West European countries) for illu-

mination on the processes of state-making weights the whole inquiry

toward a certain kind of outcome which was, in fact, quite rare. Hav-

ing chosen to deal comparatively with those large historical experi-

ences, we never quite escaped the difficulty. Nevertheless, with

many fits, starts, stalls, and backtracks, our net movement went

away from retrospective questions about political development in

general toward prospective questions about the possibilities open at

each stage in the formation of Western states.

Probabilistic vs. Deterministic E xplanatiom

Again, any analyst of state-building must choose between prob-

abilistic and deterministic modes of explanation. Having stated the

whole range of outcomes theoretically open to the European politi-

cal situation of the period before states became dominant, we ought

to explain why most of those which were theoretically open did not

occur. That explanation may be probabilistic, and therefore com»

patible with the conclusion that an unlikely set of outcomes actually

occurred in Europe. Or it may be deterministic: in the circum-

[15]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

stances, Spain had to develop the kind of political structure it ac-

quired, Brandenburg had to develop its special type. In practice, the

“explanation” is more likely to take the logically unsatisfying form

of an argument that the most probable set of outcomes actually oc-

curred—a form of argument which would have much more bite if

one could run history over and over as a series of tries at the slot ma-

chine. In any of these cases, however, we shall be engaged in formu-

lating or accepting general rules for change in political structure.

Yet we have a choice. The search for a deterministic explanation

will require us to isolate the effects of a large number of variables,

including such items as the genetic inheritance of royal families, the

vagaries of war, and the mineral composition of a country’s subsoil.

It will be correspondingly difficult to extend our conclusions to new

political systems—-—in principle, because the permutations and inter-

actions of the variables outside the range we have already observed

are certain to be complicated, in practice, because the more varia-

bles, the greater the difficulty of acquiring comparable evidence.

The search for a probabilistic explanation will permit many of these

variables to be treated as “random” and make it easier to identify

and examine the appropriate cases among the new political systems,

but it will produce explanations of the old systems which are less sat-

isfactory from the point of view of conventional historical recon-

struction, and will run the risk that one of the “random” variables

will some day reveal itself as fundamental. Since we are self-con—

sciously seeking to employ historical analysis for the purpose of edit-

ing ostensibly general theories of political transformation, we have

little choice but to adopt a probabilistic approach.

Events, Sequences, and Relationship:

Finally, we must choose among attempts to generalize about re-

current events, recurrent sequences, and recurrent relationships. At

the level of events, others have often tried to frame general state-

ments about the patterns of revolutions, of wars, of national crises,

and so on. At the level of sequences, we have a number of trials at

the delineation of standard stages of political development or the

equivalent. At the level of relationships, political analysis abounds

in arguments that parliamentary institutions thrive to the extent that

a bourgeoisie acquires power, that states in which the army is a pri-

mary channel of social mobility are vulnerable to coups and the like

—without any necessary implication that certain classes of events re-

[16}CHARLES TI LLY

cur in essentially the same pattern or that all governments of a cer-

tain general type pass through the same sequence of transforma-

tions. The choice among events, sequences, and relationships will

rest in part on the kinds of theories we hope to confront, in part on

our guesses as to whether true regularities at a world scale are likely

to appear at the level of events, sequences, or relationships.

The authors of this volume differ more widely on this issue than

on the questions of prospective-retrospective analysis or probabilism

vs. determinism. In their usual professional work, for example,

Fischer and Ardant tend to adopt economic reasoning which con-

centrates their attention on relationships (for example, between

commercialization and fiscal efficiency, or employment opportunity

and population growth) and they tend to be skeptical about stand-

ard-stage theories. Rokkan, by contrast, has in the past devoted large

efforts to the detection of standard sequences of representation, mo-

bilization or even state-building in general. Finer and Tilly, to take

the third case, have at least occasionally tried to delineate recurrent

features of coups, revolutions, and other transfers of power—of events.

Yet when it comes to the particular task of this book, we converge

on the analysis of relationships rather than of events or sequences.

There are several reasons for that. First, we find that the argu-

ments about political development which take a propositional form

(e.g., if X and Y, then Z) and therefore are susceptible of proof deal

almost exclusively with relationships, hypotheses concerning stand-

ard sequences and recurrent events ordinarily turn out, on close ex-

amination, to be tautological or purely heuristic. Second, the greater

logical strength of our position in identifying patterns of difference

among European states than in detecting their common properties

disposes us to emphasize possible relationships between geopolitical

position and military strength, between homogeneity of population

and legitimacy of political institutions, and so on. Third (and most

important), none of us thinks the European experience will repeat

itself as a set of events or sequences. Yet all of us are willing to enter-

tain the hypothesis that some of the relationships which showed up

there are quite general.

What the Europe of r 500 Had in Common

Precisely because our object is to look forward from 1600 or 16 50,

we should step back a bit in time to see what lies behind our vantage

point. The processes we are trying to examine were already well in

[17]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

motion by the seventeenth century. At the beginning of the sixteenth

——-I 5oo—we can get some sense of the common conditions and raw

materials on which the state-making processes were operating. By

comparison with other eras and other parts of the world, Europeans

of the centuries since then have experienced some common condi-

tions which have given their state-making a measure of uniformity

and have distinguished it from that now going on elsewhere. First,

the Europe of 1500 had a kind of cultural homogeneity only rivaled,

at such a geographic scale, by that of China. The earlier unification

of the Roman Empire had produced some convergence of language,

law, religion, administrative practice, agriculture, landholding, and

perhaps kinship as well. In I 500 Celts and Basques held out in the

North and West, Magyars and Mongols in the East, Turks and other

Muslims in the South; but the populations settled between them

shared a common culture and maintained extensive contacts via an

active network of trade, a constant movement of persons, and a tre-

mendous interlocking of ruling families. A single relatively central-

ized church dominated the continent’s religious life, an enfeebled

empire sprawled over the continent’s central sections, clutching

fragments of a common political tradition.

In a large part of the area a single family system predominated;

bilateral descent leading to the diffuse kindred (rather than a cor-

porate group like the lineage) as the chief larger kinship unit, tend-

ency toward nuclear family residence, small households, relatively

late marriage, frequent celibacy, and, consequently, moderate birth

rates. These arrangements probably held back the rate of population

growth when, in later centuries, mortality fell. But the major signifi-

cance of this vital and prosperous cultural homogeneity for the

emergence of states was the ease it gave to the diffusion of organiza-

tional models, to the expansion of states into new territories, to the

transfer of populations from one state to another, and to the move-

ment of administrative personnel from one government to another.

I do not mean that variation in position or previous historical ex-

perience made no difference in I 500. The Reconguista left the Span-

ish an abundant, often impoverished, nobility which was prepared

to alternate between war and disputatious idleness, unlike the

monied aristocrats of the Netherlands. The Austrian Hapsburgs

were constantly distracted from the work of internal consolidation

by the threat of the Turks, a fact which the “most Christian” king of

[I8]CHARLES TILLY

France did not scruple to use against the projects of the Hapsburg

dynasty. Despite the great international web of trade, the economic

and social lives of most Europeans were highly localized, market

production was not very extensive, internal communications were ‘

slow. Well—defined vernaculars (a number of which would later be-

come the identifying features of major states) already divided Euro-

peans into linguistic groups incapable of mutual communication.

Nevertheless, in world perspective the cultural homogeneity of the

area in which the first powerful national states arose is a condition

of prime importance.

The Peasant B are

A second condition is closely connected to it: the prevalence of

peasantry. The great bulk of the population and the great bulk of the

resources which eventually came under the command of the Euro-

pean state-makers were, in I 500, committed to a peasant way of life.

Settled cultivation in which peasant households and communities

exercised substantial claims to the land but, under a variety of in-

centives and pressures, turned over a significant part of their pro-

duction to town-based consumers (not to mention the idlers of the

countryside) in the form of rents, dues, taxes, and cash sales, ab-

sorbed most of the working energy expended in the Europe of that

time. Nomads, slash-and-burn agriculturalists, fishermen, hunters,

and even herders were rare in most of Europe. (Castile and much

of northern and western England were heavily engaged in wool pro—

duction, however, and after I 500 the demand for wool and for meat

would hasten the growth of flocks and the dispossession of plough-

men in several parts of Europe.)

The complement, or parasite, of this enormous class of peasants

was a small but widespread class of landlords. They were typically

titled, which meant that some special relationship to a sovereign

guaranteed another special relationship to the land as well as to politi-

cal power. Their control over the land ranged from (I) symbolic

dues paid by peasants who exercised practical freehold, to (2) own-

ership in the solid nineteenth-century sense of the word, to (3) dis-

cretion not only over the land but also over the labor of the men

fixed upon it———serfdom. In I 500, however, serfdom of a medieval

type was extremely rare, and the alliance between great nobles and

statesmen which was to bring something like it into being in Eastern

[I9]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had not yet

formed.

Within this peasant world, cities had been growing up as centers

of trade, communication, administration and manufacturing for

some five hundred years. The Europe of I 500 was, proportionately

speaking, most likely more urban than China and nearly as urban as

Japan. To be sure, cities spread themselves very unevenly across the

European landscape, with the greatest concentration in a central

band from south to north. The central band also contained a dispro-

portionate share of European manufacturing. For a century or so be-

fore 1500, manufacturing for urban markets had been spreading into

the countryside—most notably in the form of the cottage industries

of Flanders, southern England, and northern Italy. So the city-based

bourgeoisie already had a variety of holds on the countryside: as

merchants handling peasant produce, as masters of cities exerting

organized pressure on the countryside to assure their own provision-

ing, as entrepreneurs in rural industry, as lenders of money, and, in-

creasingly, as landlords in the hinterlands of the larger cities.

Why should this set of social arrangements afiect the emergence

of states? First, it meant that Europe as a whole already had a great

deal of wealth and productive capacity, but a wealth and productive

capacity not only heavily tied to the land but strongly committed to

a large number of individuals and local groups. Second, it shaped

the paths by which the statemakers could gain access to those re-

sources. Eric Wolf (_ 1966: 90—91) has framed some powerful general

hypotheses about the correlates of the presence or absence of large,

kin-based coalitions linking peasants to powerholders outside their

communities:

Such coalitions occur in India, the Near East, and China. They

do not occur in manorial Europe, post-Conquest Middle Amer-

ica and the Andean area, the Mediterranean, and neotechnic

Europe. The distinction appears to divide societies based on

centralized and despotic power, exercised largely through the

delegation of prebendal domains, from those in which power is

more decentralized. The decentralized systems, however, show

two subpatterns. The first, characteristic of the Mediterranean,

is built up largely in dyadic terms through patronage relation-

ships. The second, found in medieval Europe and in Middle

America and the Andes after the Spanish conquest, usually sub—

[20]CHARLES TI LLY

ordinated a corporate peasant community to a dominant do-

main owner in the vicinity. This figure then operated as a patron

towards the community as a whole.

The second major distinction divides all the systems from

neotechnic Europe, which in its emphasis on associational forms

has been able to construct vertical relationships on a single-

stranded rather than a many-stranded basis.

As compared with politiml entrepreneurs elsewhere in the world,

therefore, European state-makers had to contend rather little with

solidly organized lineages, tribes, and the like. But the landlord was

crucial. An ambitious king could form coalitions With the landlords,

could attempt to destroy, subvert, or bypass them or (more likely)

could try a combination of all of these tactics. He could not ignore

them, especially when the chief among them formed a self—conscious

hereditary caste, a nobility.

Decentralized Political Structure

This set of power relations drawing its sustenance from a peasant

base virtually implies the third general condition of the European

state-making experience: the emergence of states from the midst of

an extensive, decentralized but relatively uniform political structure.

The debris of several unifying empires remained. According to Jo-

seph Strayer, medieval theorists working with Roman tradition,

Catholic doctrine, and the realities of feudal life had already fash—

ioned a workable theory of the sovereign state—which is to say a set

of coherent justifications which could be widely used in the consoli-

dation of power. The agents of the relatively uniform political struc-

ture—princes, popes, podeste, parliamentarians—sometimes allied

themselves with kings in the making. Indeed, they were themselves

often kings in the making. But by the same token they supplied the

most obvious rivals of those who succeeded, and the most threatened

opponents of the process as a whole.

Two features of the background to European state~making de-

serve emphasis bemuse our unilinear notions of “political develop-

ment” tend to disguise them: (I) the early political importance of

deliberative assemblies, which the rise of centralized states generally

eclipsed 5 (2) the tenacious and widespread resistance to the expan-

sion of state power.

[21]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

Before the period of state preeminence, power-Wielding delibera-

tive assemblies were acting at all levels of political life from the vil—

lage council to the Electors of the Empire. The institutions did not,

of course, represent individuals in the radical democratic manner of

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the Parliament, the

Cortes, and Estates did ordinarily incorporate the principal seg-

ments of the population which had acquired or maintained liberties,

privileges sanctioned by law, in the face of the sovereign. Such as-

semblies normally had some control of taxation, which typically took

the form of an extraordinary grant for a specific purpose. Building

strong royal power meant co—opting, subordinating or destroying

these institutions 5 that program absorbed a large part of the energy

of seventeenth-century kings, and its outcome strongly affected the

next phase of political history. Local assemblies everywhere lost

power to expanding states, within a range from the retention of con-

siderable autonomy by Swiss communes to the French absorption

of existing communal assemblies into the state structure to the vir-

tual destruction of such institutions in much of the Germanies.

The fate of provincial and national bodies was more various, and

no doubt more important to the states’ later political experience. In

England the Parliament survived serious threats from the Tudors

and the Stuarts, then went on to govern. In France and Prussia the

kings were able to undermine the Estates after considerable efiort,

and at the expense of erecting large administrative structures to sup-

plant them. And in Spain crown and Cortes lumbered to a standstill.

In I 500 the governments of Europe bore considerably greater re—

semblance to one another than two or three centuries later. One of

the chief reasons for that increasing divergence is the varying course

of the contest between central power and power-Wielding assemblies

from the sixteenth century onward.

Nor were the existing assemblies the only groups which resisted

state-making. Three broad classes of people resisted: (I) the ordi-

nary people pressed to surrender men, crops, labor, goods, money,

loyalty, and sometimes land to the emerging states; (2) the estab—

lished authorities pressed to relinquish or share their power, and

( 3) the rival claimants to sovereignty.

For all their reputed docility, the ordinary people of Europe

fought the claims of central states for centuries. In England, for ex-

ample, the Tudors put down serious rebellions in 1489 (Yorkshire),

I497 (Cornwall), I 536 (the Pilgrimage of Grace), I 54.7 (the West),

[22]CHARLES TI LLY

1549 (Kett’s Rebellion), 15 53 (Wyatt’s, Rebellion), all responding

in one way or another to the centralizing efforts of the crown. These

massive provincial rebellions dwindled after 1600. Yet the revolu—

tions of the seventeenth century—despite the modernizing conse—'

quences we are now inclined to identify with them—grew most di-

rectly from the Stuarts’ effort to concentrate power in the crown.

The result was an enormous amount of conflict and resistance. As a

recent student of the period after the seventeenth-century English

revolutions has written: “By 1688 conspiracy and rebellion, treason

and plot, were a part of the history and experience of at least three

generations of Englishmen. Indeed, for centuries the country had

scarcely been free from turbulence for more than a decade at

a time” (Plumb 1967: I 5). The political transformations of the next

three or four decades, according to Plumb, firmly seated an oligar-

chical state in England, although even that onset of “political stabil-

ity” did not, by any means, eliminate violent conflict from English

political life. Many of the same sequences of demand, resistance, re-

pression and control Were, for instance, yet to be repeated in

Ireland.

Nor were things calmer across the channel. France experienced

the bloody religious wars of the sixteenth century, which pivoted to

some extent on questions of royal prerogative versus regional lib-

erties. The clear, concerted, and violent resistance to the imposition

of state control rose to its acme in the seventeenth century, as the

crown demanded greater tax revenues from the French population,

and acted to neutralize or destroy the authorities which stood in its

way. While later on the pressing or conscription of men for military

service and the forced delivery of grain to cities and armies incited

widespread, if localized, rebellions throughout Europe, the earliest,

most dramatic, and most influential forms of popular resistance cen-

tered on taxation. After all, taxation was the chief means by which

the builders of states in the sixteenth century and later supported

their expanding armies, which were in turn their principal instru—

ment in establishing control of their frontiers, pushing them out, de—

fending them against external incursions, and assuring their own

priority in the use of force within those frontiers. Conversely, mili-

tary needs were in those first centuries the main incentive for the

imposition of new taxes and the regularization of old ones. The need

fed itself, furthermore 5 the overcoming of resistance to taxation re-

quired the maintenance of a military force. So turned the tight cir-

[23]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

cle connecting state-making, military institutions and the extraction

of scarce resources from a reluctant population.

The state-makers only imposed their wills on the populace

through centuries of ruthless effort. The effort took many forms: cre-

ating distinct staffs dependent on the crown and loyal to it, making

those staffs (armies and bureaucrats alike) reliable, effective instru-

ments of policy, blending coercion, co-optation and legitimation as

means of guaranteeing the acquiescence of different segments of the

population; acquiring sound information about the country, its peo-

ple and its resources; promoting economic activities which would

free or create resources for the use of the state. In all these efforts

and more, the state-makers frequently found the traditional authori-

ties allied with the people against them. Thus it became a game of

shifting coalitions: kings rallying popular support by offering guar-

antees against cruel and arbitrary local magnates or by challenging

their claims to goods, money or services, but not hesitating to crush

rebellion when the people were divided or a suflicient military force

was at hand, magnates parading as defenders of local liberties

against royal oppression, but not hesitating to bargain with the

crown when it appeared advantageous. Ultimately, the people paid.

There were also a multitude of unsuccessful rival claimants—the

princes, bishops, dukes, and brigands who bid for sovereign power

but failed. For the reduction of Europe from some five hundred

more or less independent political units in I 500 to twenty-odd states

in 1900 produced a large number of losers. Unlike the Chinese and

Roman state-builders of earlier times, the Europeans of I 500 and

later did not ordinarily expand from a highly organized center into

a weakly organized periphery. (Which is not to say there are no

analogies like the English conquest of Ireland and the expansion of

Brandenburg-Prussia through Central Europe, or that regional vari-

ations in this regard made no difference.) Only in European colonial

expansion did that become the dominant experience.

Nor did the European state-builders often have the chance to

seize and strengthen a single preexisting political structure, as has

been the frequent experience of anticolonial rebels since the Ameri-

cans of I77 5. Indeed, building substantial states in much of Europe

meant absorbing numerous political units which already exercised

significant claims. to sovereignty—free cities, principalities, bishop-

rics, and a variety of other entities. The European state-makers en-

[24]CHARLES TI LLY

gaged in the work of combining, consolidating, neutralizing, manip-

ulating a tough, complicated, and well-set web of political relations.

They sought to fashion something larger and stronger than had

existed before. In order to accomplish that, they had to tear or dis-

solve large parts of the web, and to face furious resistance as they

did so.

Yet one feature of the earlier political structure greatly favored

the enterprise. The Europeans of I 500 had a tradition of kingship

which stretched back in diverse ways to Roman times. Just behind

them lay seven hundred years of king-making experience which (for

all its chaos) had resulted in almost every European’s being at least

nominally subject to one crown or another. The state—makers who fol-

lowed were for the most part kings and agents of kings. They were

very much members of the system they were gradually destroying.

They commanded a measure of submission on quite traditional

grounds. The genuine breaks with the tradition came with the for-

mation of federated republics like the Dutch or the Swiss, and with

the extension of European power into overseas colonies.

Conditions Favoring the National State

In order to isolate the conditions which favored the increasing

dominance of national states over the people of Western Europe, we

have to play an unseemly trick on history. We have to consider what

could have happened, instead of what was. Without some such com-

parison—implicit or explicit—between what occurred and what

could have occurred, we have no means of separating the trivial an-

tecedents of state-making from the weighty ones. In order to find a

time when the national state does not already seem to have pre-

empted all the alternatives, furthermore, we probably have to go

back as far as the thirteenth century.

Even then, according to Joseph Strayer, the form of the European

state was already well set, the time of its dominance already begun.

By 1300, it was evident that the dominant political form in

Western Europe was going to be the sovereign state. The uni-

versal Empire had never been anything but a dream , the uni-

versal Church had to admit that defense of the individual state

took precedence over the liberties of the Church or the claims

of the Christian commonwealth. Loyalty to the state was strong-

[25]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-,MAKING

er than any other loyalty, and for a few individuals (largely

governmental officials) loyalty to the state was taking on some

of the overtones of patriotism (Strayer 1970: 57).

Strayer’s test for the emergence of a state, however, is a relatively

soft one: “. . . the appearance of political units persisting in time and

fixed in space, the development of permanent, impersonal institu-

tions, agreement on the need for an authority which can give final

judgments, and acceptance of the idea that this authority should re—

ceive the basic loyalty of its subjects” (Strayer 1970: 10). The test
excludes government by corporate groups or networks which are

either geographically fragmented or constantly on the move, even

if they exercise primary claims to the obedience of their members.

It alsoiexcludes government by the coalition or federation (or, for

that matter, competition) of multiple authorities exercising jurisdic-

tion over the same populations. It excludes, finally, the incidental

exercise of political control by a structure whose principal activity

is trade, control of marriage, manipulation of sacred rites and sym-

bols, or something else of the sort. The test does not, on the other

hand, require any particular scale of government, any particular de-

gree of integration among the “permanent, impersonal institutions,”

or any great concentration of power in the central authority. When

it comes to defining the state-making processes of later centuries,

those criteria take on the greatest importance.

As a matter of fact, Strayer explicitly brings empires and city—states

under his heading, he presumably would not have great difficulty

bringing in rule by bishops and popes as well, just so long as they

controlled specialized institutions of government. So the claim for

early predominance of the state in Europe does not have quite the

sweep it first seems to have. In the thirteenth century, then, five out-

comes may still have been open: (I) the form of national state

which actually emerged, (2) a political federation or empire con-

trolled, if only loosely, from a single center; (3) a theocratic federa—

tion—a commonwealth—held together by the structure of the Cath-

olic Church; (4.) an intensive trading network Without large-scale,

central political organization; (5) the persistence of the “feudal”

structure which prevailed in the thirteenth century. The rational ap-

praisal of any such list is a peculiar task, since it is so easy to give

reasons why events which did not happen could not happen. (On

seeing this list, Joseph Strayer has said to me that the political fed-
[26]CHARLES TI LLY

eration was no more than barely possible, the theocratic federation

impossible, since the church had already conceded the temporal pri-

ority of the state, the persistence of the “feudal” structure equally.

impossible, because that structure was already gone by 1300.) Nev-

ertheless, each of the unreal outcomes corresponds to developments

which did at least begin in Western Europe.

Not only had the Roman Empire prevailed in Europe, not only

had the Holy Roman Empire persisted as its shadow, but the Haps—

burgs actually kept their own rickety federation operating into the

nineteenth century. At times they even dominated the continent. A

church-dominated federation seems implausible because we so regu-

larly oppose church and state. Yet some churchmen held great po-

litical power well into the modern period. The papal states survived

somehow into the nineteenth century. And there are examples else-

where in the world (including the nearby Near East) of large-scale,

yet decentralized, government by priests. The interlocked trading

cities of Germany and northern Italy did, in fact, long resist consoli-

dation into national states. They created commercial federations like

the Hanse, but not common armies, common bureaucracies or com-

mon fiscal structures. Finally, the “feudal” organization of manors,

towns, and overlords—for all the imprecision of the word feudal—

has a special claim: it predominated in Western Europe for several

centuries.

The structure which became dominant in Europe after I 500, the

national state, differed from these alternative possibilities in several

significant ways: (I) it controlled a well-defined, continuous terri-

tory, (2) it was relatively centralized, (3) it was differentiated from

other organizations, (4) it reinforced its claims through a tendency

to acquire a monopoly over the concentrated means of physical co-

ercion within its territory. So, in a sense, explaining how the national

state won out amounts to accounting for territorial consolidation,

centralization, differentiation of the instruments of government from

other sorts of organization, and monopolization (plus concentra-

tion) of the means of coercion.

The common conditions we have already noticed as prevailing

around I 500 obviously affected all these processes. It is not so clear,

however, that they caused the dominance of the state. The condi-

tions prevailed earlier than I 500. In 1300 as well, Europe was rela-

tively homogeneous culturally, drew the great bulk of its resources

from a peasant base, and maintained a decentralized political struc-

[27]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

ture, or, rather, a congeries of political structures. Homogeneity it-

self probably did not predispose Europe toward national states.

Elsewhere in the world, large homogeneous populations have lent

themselves well to the building of empires; although cultural homo-

geneity makes the policy of divide et impem less feasible, it

decreases the difficulty of extending uniform administrative arrange-

ments overlarge populations, and it makes common allegiance easier

to promote. The principal way in which the relative homogeneity of

the European population facilitated the emergence of the national

state rather than some other political dominant, it seems to me, was

in making it easy to divide the continent up into mutually exclusive

territories which were at once rather arbitrary and subject to con

siderable change.

Nor does there seem to be any particular affinity between peasants

and national states, not only have peasants borne the burden of em-

pires and city—states, but also European feudal arrangements de-

pended from the beginning on the presence of a subordinate peas-

antry. My earlier point was not that peasants are essential, or even

favorable, to the creation of national states, it was rather that the

predominance of peasants drew state—makers willy—nilly into strug-

gles and coalitions with the men who controlled the land. The

strongest argument one could make for the peasant base as a cause

of the state’s victory, I suppose, is that the presence of peasants gave

power to major landlords, and the necessity of coalitions with re—

gional groups of landlords (who had some choice with which au-

thorities, or Would-be authorities, to ally themselves) both limited

the scale at which princes could operate and pushed them toward

territorial agglomeration. Those circumstances, however, resulted

more directly from the decentralized political structure than from

the predominance of peasants.

It seems odd to consider that political fragmentation as one of the

conditions contributing to the final dominance of national states. Did

not the state-makers struggle continually against fragmentation? Yes,

but the very presence of multiple contenders for power, mutually

aware and relatively equal in strength, promoted a process of con—

solidation by means of shifting coalitions among geographically

concentrated elites, made it likely that more than one such process

would be going on at a time, and hampered any effort either to im-

pose an authority without contiguous territory or to subordinate a

large part of Europe to a single authority. We have the reductio ad

[28]CHARLES TI LLY

absurdum of the condition S. N. Eisenstadt analyzes in Political Sys-

tem: of Empire: (1963): a large, functioning empire goes through

a continuous cycle of building up power in its peripheral units only '

to see those who have direct access to that power turn it to their own

ends and against the central structure; when an empire disintegrates

as the Roman Empire did, perhaps it follows that its fragments are

that much harder to bring back into a common structure.

The weakness of corporate structures, especially those linked by

kinship, in Europe probably abetted this process of growth through

the manipulation of shifting coalitions. If lineages controlling land,

labor and loyalty had sprawled across the European map, it would

have been harder to break up the population into discrete territories,

co—opt powerful members of local elites without extending privileges

to their clienteles or reinforcing the lineages as such, differentiate

government from kinship, and so on. The recurrent confrontations

in our own time between corporate kin groups and non-Europeans

who have sought to construct states on the European model rein-

force this speculation. Perhaps the apparent difficulty of state-mak-

ing in those portions of Europe which did harbor fairly powerful

corporate kin groups (I have southeastern Europe especially in

mind) points in the same direction.

All the “explanations” of the victory of the national state over its

theoretically possible alternatives I have proposed so far fall into the

category of preconditions. But some features of state-building proc-

esses, and of the circumstances which accompanied them in Europe,

also deserve inquiry. First, specialized organization works. If the

task at hand is well defined and consists of manipulating the outside

world, the ruler who builds a special-purpose organization and

keeps it supplied with resources tends to have the advantage over

his rivals. Success in war is a notable example: the criteria of success

are relatively clear, the main elements of the task (if not the secret

of their accomplishment) rather clear, and the superiority of the

well-supplied special organization quite likely to tell in the long run.

For the purposes of routine regional administration, fiscal control or

the acquisition of supplies for the needs of government, a record-

keeping bureaucracy has a number of advantages over a kin group,

a patron-client chain, a trading network or the other structures built

into the theoretical alternatives to the national states.

That assertion is, to be sure, far from self-evident. One can chal-

lenge it either by recalling the importance of certain kinds of bu-

[29]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

reaucracy in imperial China and ancient Babylon or by insisting on

the costs and inefficiencies of contemporary bureaucracies. I do not

want to argue out that whole problem here. I simply want to suggest

that in medieval Europe princes who specialized their instruments

of government by forming a separate exchequer, a group of legal ad-

visors, and so on gained the organizational advantage—and that the

very tranSformation of the instruments of government in that direc—

tion promoted the formation of the large, autonomous, differentiated,

territorially distinct organization we call the national state.

Another circumstance which probably favored the fortunes of the

national state over its possible alternatives in Europe was the open-

ness of the European periphery. I have in mind both the lack of im-

portant concentrations of power around the immediate areas in

which states were forming, and the availability of territories for ex-

pansion, conquest and extraction of new resources. The Byzantine

Empire and the various Muslim empires which formed around the

Mediterranean put the most immediate pressure on European politi~

cal life. Europeans were relatively free from that sort of pressure

around some two-thirds of their perimeter. As a consequence, rela—

tively small political units could grow without being gobbled up (or

at least dominated) by adjacent empires. Furthermore, the relative-

ly small powers had room—eventually including land across the At-

lantic—to expand, colonize, and establish their own imperial con-

trol. Without this combination of circumstances, I want to suggest,

a much larger organization than the European national state might

well have been the only one that could have survived.

We should not, finally, neglect the contributions of cities, trade,

merchants, manufacturers, and early capitalism. No doubt if the

merchants and burghers of the thirteenth or fourteenth century had

laid out a political master plan for Europe, it would not have included

national states. They were much more interested in maintaining

the autonomy of cities and the links among them. Yet the intensity

of mercantile activity in Europe before the national state probably

played a major role in freeing resources, making taxation and related

forms of governmental extraction feasible, and motivating old author-

ities to develop new forms of control over the population.

Later on a powerful reciprocal relationship between the expansion

of capitalism and the growth of state power developed, despite the

frequent efforts of capitalists themselves to fight off state power;

Fernand Braudel has made the conjunction a major theme of his

[30]CHARLES TI LLY

analyses of the European sixteenth century (Braudel 194.9, 1966).

Well before then, however, the presence of a taxable wool trade was

helping an English monarchy pay for its operations, and the mer»

chants of Paris were discovering that they had to keep the crown

supplied with money. The intermittent but substantial expansion of

European trade and industry gave a competitive advantage to the

political authorities who could devise means of diverting the re-

sources to their own purposes.

In looking back over these supposed causes of the national state’s

success, we must again distinguish between the easy version of the

argument and the hard one. Obviously, all of these conditions (to

the extent that I have portrayed the conditions prevailing at the be-

ginning of European state-making accurately) afiected the way na—

tional states formed and grew. That point is trivial. The hard ques-

tions are: (I) What structural alternatives were possible; and (2)

why this alternative rather than the others? I have identified the em-

pire, the theocratic federation, the trading network and the feudal

system as possible alternatives. I have then gone on to propose that

the preexisting political fragmentation, the weakness of corporate

structures, the effectiveness of specialized organization, the open-

ness of the European periphery and the growth of cities, trade, mer-

chants, manufacturers, and early capitalism weighted the outcome

toward the national state. Such a statement implies that a number

of other factors like the particular geography of Europe, its cultural

homogeneity, and its largely peasant population did not affect the

choices among outcomes so much. The way to check out such asser-

tions is through a detailed comparative examination of the correlates

of state-making and the alternative processes both in Europe and

elsewhere. But this book can be no more than a preface to that noble

enterprise.

Different E xit: from the Common C omiz'tiom

The common conditions—the relatively standard culture, the

peasant base, the preexisting, decentralized political structure——

shaped the states which developed in Western Europe sufliciently

that they have all remained recognizably of the same species up to

our own time. Not that their trajectories have been identical; Greece,

Switzerland, and Italy produced rather different kinds of states. Let

us save the detailed comparison of individual histories for later.

Right now the problem is to identify the largest features and grossest
[31]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-IMAKING

variations in the European state-making experience from I 500

onward. ‘

In its simplest version the problem has only three elements. First,

there is the population which carries on some collective political life

—if only by virtue of being nominally subject to the same central

authority. Second, there is a governmental organization which exer-

cises control over the principal concentrated means of coercion with-

in the population. Third, there are routinized relations between the

governmental organization and the population. Historians and po-

litical scientists have at one time or another called attention to

a huge range of characteristics of such populations, governmental

structures, and relations between them. In raising preliminary ques-

tions about the alternative patterns of state-making in Europe, I

want to‘mll attention to only one broad characteristic of each of the

elements. First, the pattern of mobilization within the population

subject to each state. I mean the identity, sequence, scale, and suc—

cess of the various segments of the population which formed, ac-

quired collective control over resources, and participated in national

struggles for power. The second is the degree of “stateness” of the

governmental structure. Borrowing from J. P. Nettl (1968), I mean

the degree to which the instruments of government are differenti-

ated from other organizations, centralized, autonomous, and for-

mally coordinated with each other. Third, the forms of political

rights exercised by the population with respect to the governmental

structure. I have in mind the enforceable claims that members of the

population can make on agents of the government—both compelling

them to do something and preventing them from doing something

else.

Mobilization
Although the cultural homogeneity of Europe restricted the kinds

of groups available for mobilization anywhere and although the gen-

erality of urbanization, industrialization, and capitalization even-

tually guaranteed that every country would experience some degree

of mobilization on the part of its urban and its rural working classes,

the patterns of mobilization have varied strikingly over time and

space. Nevertheless since I 500 Europeans have rarely mobilized on

the basis of color, kinship, age, sex, or ecological position. The prin-

cipal exceptions are, no doubt, the nineteenth-century drive for

[32]CHARLES TI LLY

Women’s rights and the recurrent movements of youth. Europeans

have, on the other hand, frequently mobilized on the basis of re-

ligion, language, previous political status, community membership,

class, and, more narrowly, occupation.

As mass politics grew up from the French Revolution onward,

class, language, and religion became relatively more important as

bases of mobilization. Stein Rokkan ( I970a: 101) analyzes the shift

in this way:

Territorial oppositions set limits to the process of nation-build—

ing, pushed to their extreme they lead to war, secession, possi-

bly even population transfers. Functional oppositions can only

develop after some initial consolidation of the national terri-

tory. They emerge with increasing interaction and communica-

tion across the localities and the regions, and they spread

through a process of “social mobilization.” The growing nation-

state developed a wide range of agencies of unification and

standardization and gradually penetrated the bastions of “pri-

mordial” local culture. So did the organization of the Church,

sometimes in close cooperation with the secular administrators,

often in opposition to and competition with the oflicers of the

state. And so did the many autonomous agencies of economic

development and growth, the networks of traders and mer-

chants, of bankers and financiers, of artisans and industrial

entrepreneurs.

The early growth of the national bureaucracy tended to pro-

duce essentially territorial oppositions, but the subsequent

Widening of the scope of governmental activities and the ac-

celeration of cross—local interactions gradually made for much

more complex systems of alignments, some of them between

localities, and others acrors and wit/11°72 localities.

The order and relative weight of the diverse forms of mobilization

depended, in Rokkan’s View, on three main factors: (I) the state-

church relationship established, first, at the Reformation and, sec-

ond, at the advent of mass participation in national politics ; (2) the

relative timing of participation and of industrialization; and (3) the

cultural—and especially religious——diversity of the population un-

der the jurisdiction of the state in question. (Rokkan in Chapter 8

[33]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATErMAKING

reformulates and extends the earlier argument, but on the question

of mobilization its essence remains the same.)

The extent of mobilization on the basis of language and belief de~

pended to an important degree on the form and policy of the state.

Mobilization on the basis of class position within the industrial sys-

tem occurred regardless of the character of the state, although

twentieth-century states sometimes acted to promote working-class

mobilization (as in socialist regimes) or to check it (as in fascist re-

gimes). The state’s own policy with regard to cultural homogeniza-

tion, selection of governmental personnel, control of mobilizing

groups and other interactions between government and people itself

helped shape the pattern of mobilization.

Both peasants and workers were slow to mobilize at a national

scale; before fairly late in the nineteenth century, their mobilization

was ordinarily short-term and defensive. Before then there was

greater variation in the mobilization of the landowning and mercan—

tile classes, everywhere some kind of accommodation between land-

lords and the crown played an important part in the extension of

state power, even though landlords also supplied the most serious

resistance to state-building. That is hardly surprising, given the im-

portance and the diversity of the people who qualify somehow as

landlords in an agrarian society.

S lateness

During the last century or so, all West European governments

arrived at a relatively high level of stateness, as measured by formal

autonomy, differentiation from nongovernmental organizations, cen—

tralization, and internal coordination. They have collaborated with

each other and with their overseas offshoots in promoting the divi—

sion of the entire world into state-like units. It has not always been

50. Although the drift after I 500 throughout Europe ran toward in-

creasing stateness, different governments moved at very different

rates. As a result, international disparities in stateness increased

during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By this criterion, the

sixteenth century was a time of significantly rising stateness, the later

seventeenth century a frenzy of state-making, the eighteenth century

(outside) and the East a period of consolidation, the nineteenth cen-

tury and early twentieth century an age of convergence among gov-

ernments which were still significantly different from each other in

1800.
[34]CHARLES TI LLY

Such a summary exaggerates the regularity of the process, and

obscures crucial leads and lags. With respect to autonomy, differen-

tiation, centralization, and internal coordination, France led Europe .

through almost all the period after I 500, while England accumulated

stateness at a slower pace and at a lower level. Yet in I6 50 England

lay under the control of a centralizing military dictatorship, While

France underwent the fragmentation of the Fronde, for that brief

moment the English government was very likely the most state-like

in Europe. All things considered, however, England (which did so

much of its governmental business through justices of the peace, pri—

vate corporations, merchant fleets and similar groups only indirectly

attached to the central structure) survived into the nineteenth cen-

tury with a rather low level of stateness. Again, Spain produced a

sixteenth-century spurt of state-making which, if continued, could

easily have brought her to Europe’s highest level of centralization,

differentiation, autonomy and coordination, the process slowed, and

sometimes reversed, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As

a result, Spain entered the age of industry and empire with one of

the least stately governmental structures of the continent.

Extreme stateness, of course, neither guarantees political stability

nor assures power in the international arena. One might guess that

an increase in stateness does ordinarily increase a government’s com-

mand of the mobile resources within its subject population, does in-

crease its capacity to free resources which embedded in traditional

networks of obligation, and thereby augments the government’s

power to apply resources to objectives at a national or international

scale. But if the European experience is a guide, the short-run cost

is an increase in the likelihood of resistance and revolt. Hence, a

close historical connection among increases in stateness, expansion

of armed forces, rises in taxation, and popular rebellion.

Political Rights

Between the development of stateness, on the one hand, and the

pattern of mobilization, on the other, comes the acquisition of po-

litical rights binding on agents of the government by the members

of the mobilized groups within the subject population. Extensions

of the suErage, for example, do not follow from the pace of state—

making alone, or from the pattern of mobilization alone, but from an

interaction between the two processes. One could, it is true, make a

[35]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATEfMAKING

credible case for two subtly complementary propositions: (1)

among European governments, those which were higher in stateness

by the nineteenth century extended the suffrage farther and faster;

(2) but extensions of the suffrage were more durable and supported

by surer guarantees in the less state-like governments (cf. Rokkan

I970: 82—88). The propositions would, however, break down entirely

if applied to changes over time, since the movement to a wider suf-

frage and the continued growth of stateness occurred together, yet

in nothing like the same rhythm. To understand the early (if tem—

porary) advent of manhood suffrage in France (1793) or Prussia

(I 849), we shall have to grasp the vast mobilization of peasants and

workers which occurred just before those years, and the acute po-

litical pressure it placed on the managers of the states in question.

A number of other political rights ought (at least in principle)

to yield to the same sort of comparative analysis which has aided

theorizing about electoral systems: the state’s assurance of the forms

of justice, the right of assembly, freedom of the press, the right of

petition, protection of religious minorities, defense of life and prop-

erty, and other claims of individuals or groups on the state which are

guaranteed in principle and in general rather than through personal

influence or special connections. The development of such rights is

much harder to define, detect and compare than the acquisition of

voting rights. They fluctuate from regime to regime. They are vul-

nerable to invisible abridgements. Conversely, they often accrete

slowly and inconspicuously before being sanctified in law. They al-

ways apply unequally in actual practice. And the managers of states

always claim that they are more general than reality shows them to

be. In compensation for these difficulties in the systematic study of

political rights, they cluster to some degree, and may even form a

kind of scale.

For present purposes, the significant thing about such rights is not

that they should exist in the abstract, but that the state, rather than

some other organization, should become the focus of their enforce-

ment. Indeed, rather than thinking of abstract rights which are en-

forced (or violated) by states, it would be more illuminating to

think of political rights as claims binding the agents of the state to

specific groups of people: religious minorities can all on the state

to defend them against persecution, adult citizens can insist the state

give them their day in court, the indigent can claim sustenance from

[36]CHARLES TI LLY

the state. These are political rights in a large sense—political in that

they constitute binding claims on the agents of government, rather

than on some other group.

That specification clarifies a large historical transformation. The

European national revolutions of the last few centuries did not so

much expand political rights as concentrate them in the state and

reduce their investment in other sorts of governments. A large part

of the process consisted of the state’s abridging, destroying or ab-

sorbing rights previously lodged in other political units: manors,

communities, provinces, estates. In cases like the state’s seizure of

control over justice from manorial lords, churches and communities,

the right itself continued in more or less the same form, but under

new management. In other cases, the right disappeared entirely. The

right of a household to pasture its flock on the Village commons is a

notorious example, the right of the household’s head to punish its

members is a less obvious one.

Nothing could be more detrimental to an understanding of this

whole process than the old liberal conception of European history

as the gradual creation and extension of political rights. Europeans

created and used a wide variety of representative institutions (al-

though not, of course, in the image of the nineteenth-century par-

liaments) before the heyday of the national state. Far from promot-

ing such institutions, early state-makers struggled against them.

Bernard Guénée gives us an idea of the fourteenth-century prelude:

In the middle of the fourteenth century, most likely between

1345 and 1360, the chivalric orders were born, the progress of

bureaucratization was checked for a long time to come, the first

great revolutionary wave swept across Europe, representative

assemblies had their first great successes, and the peoples of

Europe seized their most handsome rights from their princes.

Fifty years later, the weight of the English Parliament was so

great that Stubbs could speak . . . of Lancastrian parliamenta-

rism; a new revolutionary wave was crossing France and Cata-

lonia, the Estates were achieving their greatest strength in Ger-

many, the Council of Constance weakened the foundations of

papal monarchy, the Hussite revolution shook the Empire and

challenged the social order. After that came the reflux. Little by
little, the Pope and the princes got a grip on themselves, demo-

[37]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

cratic convictions faded, the orders of chivalry died, and the

bureaucratization began again (Guénée 1971: 4.05).

For a long time after then, the builders of states worked to stamp out

or absorb existing rights, not to extend them.

Rights in the form of claims on the state emerged through an in-

teraction between populations mobilizing at a national scale and

governments acquiring greater and greater stateness. The mobiliz-

ing groups ordinarily made the claims long and insistently before

statesmen, with good grace or bad, honored them. The right of as-

sembly illustrates the point very well. Far from being a right well

established in the abstract, it comes into being as a claim of specific

segments of the population and specific types of groups—Jews,

young: people, vagabonds, revolutionaries, sportsmen, patriots—to

the protection of the state in their collective occupation of public

places. For this reason, changes in the law and in the policing of

public assemblies are among our most valuable signs of the acquisi-

tion and loss of political power by different segments of the

population.

The three sorts of political change I have singled out for examina-

tion—changes in stateness, patterns of mobilization, acquisitions and

losses of political rights—do not fit together into any single pattern

we could confidently call “political development.” Each includes

some of the transformations which analysts of the contemporary

world have put under that heading. For our purposes, rather than

patching the battered label, it seems more useful to portray the great

political changes involved in the emergence of the European state

system as an interaction between two partly independent processes,

mobilization and state-making, with the acquisition and loss of rights

by different segments of the population being a product of that

interaction.

What Distinguishes the Survivors and Victor's?

Most of the European efforts to build states failed. The enormous

majority of the political units which were around to bid for auton-

omy and strength in I 500 disappeared in the next few centuries,

smashed or absorbed by other states—in~the-making. The substantial

majority of the units which got so far as to acquire a recognizable

existence as states during those centuries still disappeared. And of

the handful which survived or emerged into the nineteenth century

[38]CHARLES TILLY

as autonomous states, only a few operated effectively—regardless of

what criterion of effectiveness we employ. The disproportionate dis—

tribution of success and failure puts us in the unpleasant situation

of dealing with an experience in which most of the cases are nega-

tive, while only the positive cases are well-documented.

Yet we ask what distinguishes the positive cases from the rest. We

must at least raise the question, we mean to confront available gen-

eral ideas about state-making, and those ideas have to do mostly

with success and failure. Unfortunately, most of the available ideas

straddle the level of generality at which we are attempting to work:

either abstracting so greatly that the propositions come close to be—

ing matters of definition, or staying so close to one historical model

that all other cases become, in their own ways, failures. Neverthe—

less, it is clear enough to what features of political experience most

of the available theories call our attention. By and large we get the
image of two rather autonomous clusters of processes: the first clus-

ter variously called social change, modernization or social and eco-

nomic development, the second cluster labeled political moderniza-

tion, political development, or even nation-building. Obviously the

old division between state and society has gone into motion. The two

clusters of processes are supposed to interact, disrupting or facilitat—

ing each other. Thus the managers of the political structure face two

sorts of “problems”: (I) coping with the difliculties produced by

social change 5 and (2) directing social change toward some desired

set of outcomes. Performance in these two regards (which emphati-

cally include the survival of the government itself) then provides the

criteria of success or failure.

The disagreements within this predominant tradition of theorizing

generally concern the direction of causal connections between the

“social” and “political” processes (to what extent does change in the

government simply reflect change in social structure?), the gov-

ernmental arrangements most likely to produce the two kinds of

success, the degree to which each of the two clusters of processes fol-

lows the same path in every country, and, alas, the proper terminol-

ogy for discussing all these diflicult questions. Beneath the surface

a debate about the proper and possible roles of government also

continues. To my mind, the most interesting thing about this way of

setting up the inquiry is its perfect consistency with the world-view

of the high administrative official. There it is: an outside world to be

coped with or transformed by means of governmental instruments,

[39]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

themselves subject to improvement or decay. No doubt that is the

phenomenology most compatible with the aspiration to wring state-

making instructions for the present from the experience of the past.
The main questions I am raising here, however, are somewhat less

instrumental and somewhat more naturalistic. At each point in time

from I 500 onward, what features of a political unit would have per-

mitted us to anticipate whether it would (I) survive into the follow-

ing period as a distinct unit, (2) undergo territorial consolidation,

centralization, differentiation of the instruments of government from

other sorts of organization and monopolization of the means of co-

ercion; (3) become the nucleus of a national state? What features

of a population would have permitted us to make the same kinds of

predictions about the political units claiming jurisdiction over it? In

general, it seems to me, the answers have to do with whether the

managers of the political units undertook activities which were ex-

pensive in goods and manpower, and built an apparatus which effec-

tively drew the necessary resources from the local population and

checked the population’s efforts to resist that extraction of resources.

Such a statement, to be sure, simply shoves many of the more inter-

esting questions back one step. (It sidesteps, for example, the prob—

lem of how England grew powerful and survived into the nineteenth

century with a relatively puny central structure.) Nevertheless, to

the degree that the statement is correct we should only consider the

form of representation, the geopolitical position, the culture of the

local population or any number of other factors in so far as they af-

fect the propensity of political units to carry on expensive activities

and the ability of those units to extract the essential resources from

the population.

The individual papers in this volume contain a number of observa—

tions on these very questions. I shall itemize the salient arguments

which emerge from the papers later in this chapter. Here I only

want to mention the most general conditions which appear, in the

European experience, to predict survival and state-making: (I) the

availability of extractible resources; (2) a relatively protected posi-

tion in time and space; (3) a continuous supply of political entre-

preneurs; (4.) success in war; (5) homogeneity (and homogeniza.

tion) of the subject population; (6) strong coalitions of the central

power with major segments of the landed elite. A high standing on

one of the factors can make up for a low standing on another. Bran—

denburg-Prussia, for example, began with an impoverished territory,

[40]CHARLES TILLY

but its succession of political entrepreneurs squeezed every available

resource from the population. France, on the other hand, went

through several shortages of entrepreneurial talent at the center, but

was able to draw continuously on a rich and populous territory.

The availability of extractible resources is hard to disentangle

from the actual fact of their extraction. The value of resources de-

pends on their use, and their use depends on their availability. Nev-

ertheless it is safe to say that the chance to tax goods passing through

the Sound gave Danish state-making a great, if temporary, boost;

that Spain built a substantial state apparatus with American silver

before its seventeenth-century slowdown; and that the levying of

customs duties on wool eased the English way to a durable national

state.

The “protected position in time and space” generally distinguished

the Scandinavian powers from the principalities of Germany—al-

though any such generalization depends on where and when other

concentrations of power are growing up, in the time of Swedish ex-

pansion, the other Scandinavian states had a precarious hold on

their existence. For much of the time under consideration here the

Poles and the Austrian Hapsburgs found themselves in exposed con-

ditions, while Portugal had. only her neighbor (and sometime

spouse) Spain to worry about. In any case, the political units which

were vulnerable to military attack and/ or adjacent to expanding

states had great difficulty in maintaining their autonomy and in

keeping their dissident populations under control.

Where a single dynasty exercises strong claims on the crown, a

continuous supply of political entrepreneurs may depend on fertility

and genetic endowment. One can make a case that the mediocrity

of the later dukes of Burgundy destroyed the real opportunity for

a Burgundian kingdom to the northeast of France, or that Spain sim-

ply ran into an ungifted string of kings in the seventeenth century.

If so, these are not “accidents,” but more or less foreseeable conse-

quences of relying exclusively on inheritance to fill the entrepre-

neurial positions. Royal inheritance was not, for that matter, an im-

mutable fact of life. We ought to remember that the English con-

trived to change their ruling family three or four times in the seven-

teenth century, as late as the accession of George I (1714.), there

was still a real chance that the magnates would intervene to produce

a more acceptable king. In any case, over the whole European ex-

perience the ability to recruit talented ministers like a Cromwell, a

[M]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

Colbert, a Pombal, or a Cavour was probably more important than

the gene pool of the royal house. And that was no accident.

Success in war will receive a good deal of attention later in this

book. I call attention to it now for more than the trivial reason that

most of the political units which disappeared perished in war. The

building of an effective military machine imposed a heavy burden

on the population involved: taxes, conscription, requisitions, and

more. The very act of building it—when it worked—produced ar-

rangements which could deliver resources to the government for

other purposes. (Thus almost all the major European taxes began as

“extraordinary levies” earmarked for particular wars, and became

routine sources of governmental revenue.) It produced the means

of enforcing the government’s Will over stiff resistance: the army. It

tended; indeed, to promote territorial consolidation, centralization,

differentiation of the instruments of government and monopolization

of the means of coercion, all the fundamental state-making proc-

esses. War made the state, and the state made war.

The homogeneity of the subject population was, by contrast, no

more than a contributing factor. The presence of a culturally homo—

geneous population no doubt lowered the cost of state-making by

making uniform administrative arrangements feasible, by promoting

loyalty and solidarity of the subject population (so long as the man-

agers of the state belonged to the same culture), and by putting

ready-made communication systems at the disposal of the rulers.

Joseph Strayer makes the important distinction between the unitary

state and the mosaic state: the first, like England, forming by a proc-

ess which leaves no significant provincial liberties, the second, like

France, reflecting the successive absorption of areas with distinct

traditions and political institutions in the persistence of variable law

and variable administration. (Great Britain, by drawing Scotland

and Ireland under the control of a single crown, became more of a

mosaic state, but only after its English core had produced quite a

sturdy state apparatus.) Strayer gives even greater emphasis to the

distinction between the state formed of a single regnum (a popula-

tion which acknowledged its attachment to some particular royal

family in the period after the collapse of the Roman Empire) and

the state which was only a fragment of such a regmmz. He argues:

Both these differences are important in the next stage—chang-

ing the state into a nation. Where a Whole regnum became a

[42]CHARLES TILLY

state, nationalism developed early and naturally, with no great

strain or exaggerated emotional appeals. In such a state, people

were gradually brought into closer and closer association with

each other. The ringwall of the state cut them off, to some ex-

tent, from the rest of the world; they were forced to work to-

gether and to adapt to each other. They had time to gain a clear

sense of identity, to smooth out some of their regional differ-

ences, and to become attached to their ruler and the institutions

through which he ruled. Where the framework of the state was

strong enough and persistent enough, it even created a common

nationalism out of very different linguistic and cultural groups.

Languedoc was very like Catalonia and very unlike north

France, yet it finally became thoroughly French.

It is also clear that the unitary state had an advantage over

the “mosaic” state. The central government of a unitary state

did not have to worry about provincial privileges, nor did it

have to create a huge, and often unpopular, bureaucracy to co-

ordinate and control diverse and quarrelsome local authorities.

Local leaders did not have to be looked on with suspicion as

men whose primary loyalty was to their province. Instead, they

could be used to explain and adapt the government’s program

to their communities. They gradually began to think in terms of

the national interest, because there were no provincial interests

to distract their attention. Common laws and common institu-

tions created a greater sense of identity than there was in coun-

tries where a man from one province could not understand the

governmental procedures of a neighboring province (Strayer

I971: 346—347).
As compared with the accounts you will find later in this book,

Strayer’s analysis has rather a lot of consensus and rather little co-

ercion in the process by which states formed. Once translated into

statements about the costs of securing compliance under varying

conditions of homogeneity, however, Strayer’s summary fits neatly

with the line of argument we pursue.

Over and above the early homogeneity of the population subject

to a particular political unit, the unit’s success or failure of homoge-

nizing its population also affected the likelihood that it would be-

come and remain an autonomous state. Almost all European govern-

ments eventually took steps which homogenized their populations:

[43]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

the adoption of state religions, expulsion of minorities like the Moors

and the Jews, institution of a national language, eventually the or-

ganization of mass public instruction. The tolerance of the states of

Southeastern Europe for linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity

stood in sharp contrast to the intolerance of their Northwestern

brethren, and surely stood in the way of effective state-making. The

failure to homogenize increased the likelihood that a state existing

at a given point in time would fragment into its cultural subdivisions

at some time in the future.

Finally, the favorable effects on state-making of strong coalitions

between the central power and major segments of the landed elite

resulted from a simple reality we discussed earlier: the great pre-

dominance of peasants in the European population. The predomi-

nance of peasantry meant (I) that the bulk of the resources which

might be available for the building of states were committed to the

land in one way or another; (2) that control over that land was

widely dispersed; and (3) that landlords—especially landlords who

wanted reinforcement in their efiorts to coerce the local peasantry—

became indispensable allies and formidable enemies in the effort to

tax, conscript, and requisition.

This summary does not in the least contradict the fact that the

Prussian electors, the French kings, and most other European sov-

ereigns had to invest a great deal of their energy in struggles against

great magnates and corporate bodies of the nobility. The electors,

after all, helped create a division of labor between Junkers and bu-

reaucrats (at the expense of peasants and townsmen alike) which

carried on into the nineteenth century; according to Hans Rosenberg

(I9 5 8) and Barrington Moore ( 1966), that division of labor became

the key to the authoritarian Prussian state. Where no strong coali-

tion formed and where the landlords completely outweighed the

crown—Spain and Poland are two likely examples—the work of

state—making tended to halt, or crumble.

At least one big thing is missing from this preliminary inventory

of factors promoting the survival of some states and the disappear-

ance of others. That is the international context of any particular

state’s emergence and growth. I see two sides to the problem: ( I)

the changing structure of the European economy as a Whole; and

(2) the emergence and evolution of an international system of states.

Immanuel Wallerstein has done a superb analysis of the way what

he calls the “European world—economy” came into being from the

[44]CHARLES TILLY

mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries (Wallerstein 1974).

He points to the emergence in that period of a large-scale economic

division of labor, extending outside of Europe to the Americas and

elsewhere. Within that world economy, by his account, a small and

changing set of core states dominated the commercial transactions,

did the lion’s share of the manufacturing, and pushed the peripheral

areas toward large-scale monoculture. In the process, the once-thriv-

ing manufacturing and commerce of the periphery dwindled, some-

times to nothingness, even splendid Venice declined. Formerly trib-

utary areas like England became central.

Wallerstein points out that the formation of the European world

economy was exceptional, perhaps unique, in not leading to a single

imperium of the sort which had come to govern the great economic

spaces of Rome, Byzantium, and China. Instead, multiple states, at

least partly independent of each other, sprang up. This fact was in

itself very likely crucial for the development of capitalism, since it

reduced the capacity of any particular government to capture (or

smother) the arrangements of investment, lending, production, or

distribution. Moreover, state-making efiorts at the center of this

emerging world-economy, fed by the flow of resources from the

periphery and eased by the monetization of economic life around

the center, had a far greater chance of success than those at the

periphery. The correspondence is imperfect: Holland stood at the

middle of the entire process, and yet did not mount a particularly

strong state; the commercialized regions of western Germany re-

sisted incorporation into substantial states, nor is it clear that the six-

teenth-century eminence of Spain depended on its being a “core

state” in the same sense that England was. Still the position of any

population or any political unit Within the World economy deeply

affected its prospects for state-making.

The second international process which my analysis has so far

neglected is the crystallization of a system of states acknowledging,

and to some extent guaranteeing, each other’s existence. Perhaps the

Treaty of Westphalia (1648), at the close of the Thirty Years War,

first made it clear that all of Europe was to be divided into distinct

and sovereign states whose boundaries were defined by international

agreement. Over the next three hundred years the Europeans and

their descendants managed to impose that state system on the entire

world. The recent wave of decolonization has almost completed the

mapping of the globe into that system.

[45]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

The filling-in of the state system significantly constrained the later

participants in European state-making. Whereas the territory even-

tually to be controlled by the Prussia or the Spain of the fifteenth

century was still quite open, the maximum space—at least within

Europe—which a united Italy could claim in the nineteenth century

was essentially set by the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars. Further-

more, the new states came increasingly to form as consequences of

wars among established members of the state system and of the ne-

gotiations which ended those wars. The Treaty of Westphalia, the

Congress of Vienna, and the Treaty of Versailles provide increas-

ingly dramatic demonstrations of the point. As a consequence, the

later the state-making experience under examination, the less likely

the sorts of internal processes I emphasized earlier are to provide an

adequate explanation of the formation, survival or growth of a state.

The Task: of Our Papers

Still, we have to get those internal processes right. They absorb

most of the attention of the essays in this book. Our authors, true to

their commissions, have touched on a great variety of questions,

each in his own way. Some, like Bayley, have strongly emphasized

the systematic, structural questions in a manner clearly influenced

by the style of comparative politics. Others, like Braun, have insisted

on the byways, particularities, and continuities in a manner just as

clearly instilled by historical training. As a result, any attempt to ar-

ray the papers as if they were repeated answers to the same insistent

question will be presumptuous and unfair. Presumptuous, because

of the pretense that one knows better than the authors what they

were finding out. Unfair, because of the sacrifice of each paper’s sep-

arate richness and coherence.

Nevertheless, my attempts at synthesis follow just such an unfair,

presumptuous course. Here I attempt to see what sorts of general

conclusions concerning the ways national states actually formed in

Western Europe emerge from our varied essays. In the final chapter,

I try to treat the same material more analytically, asking what gen-

eral statements about the formation of national states might follow

if the European experience were the universal one, and how those

statements jibe with existing theories of large-scale political change.

Although the two essays overlap, the first proceeds mainly from the

perspective of history, the second mainly from the perspective of po-

litical science. In either case, the best we can hope for is a set of pro-

[46]CHARLES TI LLY

visional conclusions: more solid than working hypotheses, perhaps,

but less firm than theses one nails up, to challenge all the world, at

the end of a long inquiry.

Our authors claim no more. They often have to take sides on ques-

tions which they know to be still undecided—as when Finer com—

mits himself to the View that the Brandenburg Recess of 16 5 3 in it-

self “was to have the most far-reaching consequences for the future

polity and to set a distinctive stamp upon the military format until

the defeat at Jena in 1806; and in many respects till well on into the

third quarter of the nineteenth century.” In so saying, Finer commits

himself on an open question. He separates himself to some extent

from an argument like Barrington Moore’s, where 16 5 3 appears as

only one of many incidents in the jostling and balancing of the urban

commercial classes, the great landlords and the crown in Branden-

burg—Prussia.

None of us claims his arguments or evidence will themselves de—

cide the issue. Each of us concedes that if he has adopted a mistaken

position on one of the great questions, his more immediate argu-

ments will be weakened as Well. My own analysis of food supply, for

example, adopts the standard arguments that influential English

landlords of the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth centuries

were actively involved in the export of grain and pushing the gov-

ernment toward a policy of favoring exports even to the short-run

detriment of English consumers. That could be wrong. To the extent

that it is wrong, my tracing of variations in national food policy to

the major class alliances formed by the crown loses plausibility. So

it is with a great many positions the other authors have adopted pro-

visionally, and with trepidation.

If the papers in this book have value, it will not be due to the new

general explanations they offer for the rise of capitalism or the de-

cline of Spain. Instead, their originality lies in their emphasis on

What Gabriel Ardant calls the “physiology” of state-making: how the

builders of states actually performed, or tried to perform, the extrac-

tive, coercive, and coordinative side of their work. This emphasis on

mechanisms draws attention away from the forms of states and the

broadest ends of state-making toward the implications of alternative

public policies. At many points, our authors are writing as if the

years after I7 50 or 1800 had not yet occurred, as if the choices were

still open, as if they were calculating the probable consequences of

one policy or another on the basis of a more powerful analytic sys-

[47]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

term than was actually available to anyone at the time. They gen—

erally opt, that is, for a probabilistic analysis over a deterministic

one, for the study of relationships over the study of recurrent events

or sequences, and for a prospective rather than a retrospective View

of state-making processes.

Some Biases of the Paper:

From the prospective point of View, however, the papers have

some significant biases. They are heavily weighted toward whole

states, and big states like France and Spain at that. They make it

easier for us to place ourselves in the seats of power in Versailles or

Madrid than to reconstruct the calculations of an Andalusian land-

lord or of a German princeling. They are heavily weighted toward

the states which survived past the eighteenth century: England,

Prussia, and Sweden rather than Bohemia, Scotland, Lorraine, or

even Naples. And they are somewhat weighted toward feature: of

states which were visible within the last century: bureaucracy rather

than the sale of offices, mass professional armies rather than militias,

specialized police forces rather than posses. If venality, militias, and

posses were not simply the fading features of the old regime, but the

intermediate institutions which were crucial to the emergence of the

states we_know, our analyses will tend to misrepresent the develop-

mental processes which created and then destroyed them.

I do not mean these remarks as attacks on our authors. These

biases result from the original charges we gave them: to compare

the carrying out of some particular state-making activity in several

major European countries over a substantial segment of the period

since I 500. These biases toward what survived, furthermore, per-

vade the existing historical literature. To some extent, they even

pervade the sources themselves. Whatever their origin, the biases

mean that we have only been partly successful in our aim of creating

a prospective analysis of state-making processes.

The original agenda also gave little weight to several institutions

and processes which our papers disclose as crucial to the phenomena

we self-consciously set out to study. Churches and religious organ-

ization should have received more direct attention from the start, for

two reasons: (I) churches and churchmen were significant political

actors at the national and international levels throughout most of the

period we are examining, at times they comprised the most formida-

ble rivals, allies, enemies, or instruments of the great state-makers;

[48]CHARLES TI LLY

and (2) for several centuries of our era, nationalism and antination-

alism alike customarily wore the mantle of religious faith, great

states like France and the Netherlands were rent by struggles which

inextricably combined religion and politics. For those reasons, con-

trol of belief and devotion should probably have been on our initial

agenda. -

Likewise, linguistic and cultural policies deserve more direct at-

tention than our general plan allotted them. If Stein Rokkan is right

in asserting that early cultural homogeneity within a territory

strongly facilitated the emergence of a durable state, that its absence

significantly limited the capacity of any state to mobilize its re-

sources, and that the successful European states generally engaged

in a deliberate program of homogenization, we have slighted one of

the major dimensions of our problem, and one of the most interest-

ing points of contact between the early history of Europe and the

current experience of the world’s many multicultural states.

I mentioned earlier another omission which we often noticed in

our discussions: the administration of law and justice. In passing, the

papers on armies, taxation, police, and control of food supply in-

evitably make judgments on law and justice. But none of them delib-

erately treats in its own terms the use of courts, lawmakers, punitive

power and legal jurisdictions as a means of extending the power of

the state. The result, I fear, is to make less clear than need be the

close relationship between policing and the other processes of con-

trol and extraction we analyze. Bayley’s argument linking changes

in the organization of policing to the emergence of new challengers

to the existing distribution of power points in that direction. It does

not quite bring out the extent to which European states used their

legal apparatus not merely to hold off threats to public order, but to

define “disorder,” create “disorder,” and press their right to suppress

the same “disorder.”

Finally, an omission which now seems odd indeed. None of our

papers contains a sustained discussion of the general administrative

structure of the various European states, or of their changes over

time. Finer’s paper naturally says a great deal about the organiza-

tion of armies, Braun’s plenty about the personnel of fiscal adminis-

tration, and so on. Fischer and Lundgreen are specifically concerned

with the ways Europeans set, judged and acquired the qualifications

for office. Yet just as we tend to assume knowledge of the judicial

system, we also tend to take the general administrative organization

[49]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

for granted. This weakness, too, flows from our original setting of

the problem; we emphasized function rather than form. Since one

of our recurrent discoveries has been the constraint set on emerging

functions by existing forms, we pay a substantial price for that

emphasis.

All this means that our papers fall far short of presenting a com-

prehensive or balanced portrayal of the whole European state-build-

ing process ; that was never our purpose. The countries, periods, in-

stitutions and processes under study are slanted toward those which

yield the clearest pictures of effective extraction, coercion, and con—

trol on the large scale. The advantage of that selection is to reveal

subtle relationships between different kinds of extraction, coercion,

and control; Finer’s neat formulation of “cycles” of extraction, econ-

omy-technology, etc. lays out the interdependencies more delib-

erately than the other arguments do, but every paper identifies rela-

tionships of this kind. Taxation, for example, ordinarily shows up in

European histories (not to mention theories of political develop-

ment) as an epiphenomenon—and a rather uninteresting one at that.

Guided by Ardant and Braun, we begin to see how crucial the form

and effectiveness of taxation were to the military strength of differ-

ent European states, on the one hand, and to the likelihood of mass

rebellion against those states, on the other.

Again, specialized policing often seems to be a more or less auto-

matic response to individual or collective threats against public or—

der—a response whose vigor and effectiveness vary from one setting

to another, but whose character is pretty much set by the technical

problem of controlling criminals and rioters. Bayley shows the dif-

ferentiation of police forces in the contemporary sense from the

much wider range of activities and personnel implied by the Ger-

man Polizei or the Italian polizia. He shows that the degree of dif-

ferentiation varied considerably from country to country, in re~

sponse to the domestic political situation. Most importantly, he

shows (or rather argues, since the hypothesis is fresh and the evi-

dence far from tabulated) that changes in the format of policing de-

pended closely on the national elite’s responses to the perceived

threats of new groups making bids for power from outside the po-

litical system. The analyses of taxation and of policing illustrate very

well what it means to analyze state-making as a series of relation-

ships, rather than as a set of recurrent events or of standard

sequences.

[50]CHARLES TI LLY

A Review

Before examining the entire set of papers for major relationships,

let me review them individually for the main themes the authors

themselves have stressed. That will, perhaps, relieve the authors of

the blame for later misapplications of the conclusions.

FINER 0N MILITARY FORCES

S. E. Finer traces the relationship between the development of

major features of the modern state (territorial consolidation, spe-

cialized personnel, integrity recognized by other states), its special

case the modern nation-state (which adds self-consciousness of com-

mon identity, as well as some mutual distribution and sharing of

duties and benefits) and the changing character of national armed

forces (especially as summed up by “format,” which includes basis

of service, size composition and stratification). His principal method

is to compare the transformations of France, Britain, and Prussia-

Germany in both regards, arguing causal connections by comparison.

And his chief conceptual device is the identification of clusters of

variables, or “cycles”: (1) economy—technology-format5 (2) strati—

fication-format, ( 3) beliefs-format, (4) format options; (5) extrac—

tin-coercion; and (6) state-building. Having identified the cycles

in this way, he then forms his argument as a series of statements

about links among the cycles.

Within this complicated chainwork, Finer lays particular empha-

sis on the first cycle, economy-technology-format. He shows how

each major military invention over a thousand years (most of the

earlier “inventions” being organizational and tactical rather than

technical in any narrow sense) drove those rulers who wished to

continue the pursuit of their objectives by force of arms to push their

subject populations harder and more continuously for the necessary

resources. Those who succeeded used their armed strength to con-

solidate their control of a territorial base as well as to assure external

acceptance of that control, since they characteristically promoted

the formation of specialized personnel for the performance of these

tasks, the military enterprise played a major part in the creation of

all three distinctive signs of the modern state: territorial consolida-

tion, specialized personnel, recognized integrity. Many failed; their

states or protostates fell into rebellion, disintegration, or absorption

by others. For the survivors, instead of a continuous accretion of

central power, we witness an alternation of long pauses with giant

[51]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

steps closely following changes in military technology and the scale

of war.

Finer is no narrow technological determinist. He sees the political

effects of military reorganization as conditioned by the extent and

accessibility of resources within the subject population, on the one

hand, the degree of popular commitment to the national cause, on

the other. This comes out clearly in his discussion of the mass mo-

bilization called for by Napoleonic warfare, and of increasing de-

mands of war since the time of Napoleon. It is also precisely at this

point that Finer brings out most sharply another argument which

lies hidden through most of the paper: that the state-makers were

actually building an interlocking system of states: general wars be-

came the principal means by which the realignments of the partici-

pants and their boundaries occurred, the principal moments at

which multiple changes of membership and alliance occurred, as

well as principal occasions on which the relations between rulers

and ruled changed rapidly. The French Revolution, the Napoleonic

Wars, and the Congress of Vienna bring out these interdependent

effects most fully and dramatically. The virtue of Finer’s analysis is

to show that 1789—1815 was no odd exception to the long run of Eu-

ropean experience. That conclusion brings a tragic tone to his final

passages. For it comes close to saying that war is the characteristic

condition, and armed force the characteristic instrument, of the state

system.

ARDANT ON FINANCIAL POLICY AND ECONOMIC INFRASTRUCTURE

Gabriel Ardant is far from an incurable optimist, but he is more

intent than Finer on drawing practical lessons from the past. He asks

himself which financial policies will work under what social condi-

tions, with what social costs. In his analysis, financial policy centers

on taxation, but includes monetary regulation, public credit, and the

whole range of procedures by which governments control their reve-

nues. Obviously these procedures intertwine with those by which

governments attempt to intervene in the economies on which they

are based—income policies, incentives for investment, and so on.

Ardant is interested in them mainly in so far as they contribute to

the viability of the state itself, and to its ability to pursue the goals

its rulers have set for it. The social conditions to which he attaches

greatest importance are the forms of production and marketing. And

[52]CHARLES TI LLY

the social costs he considers most seriously are political ones: the

impositions of arbitrary rule, on the one hand, the outbreak of bloody

rebellion, on the other.

At its simplest moments, Ardant’s model of the state contains only

a handful of variables: (I) a set of expensive goals articulated and

pursued by the rulers of a state; (2) a bundle of financial policies

designed to draw the resources necessary for the pursuit of those

goals from the population under the state’s control; ( 3) an economic

infrastructure producing and containing such resources as the popu-

lation has at its disposal; (4) financial consequences of applying a

particular set of policies to a particular sort of infrastructure; and

(5) social and political consequences of variables 2 (policies) and

4. (financial consequences), including the extent to which the rulers’

goals were actually accomplished.

Schematically, the model is seen in Figure 1—1 .

I . Governmental

Goals

2. Financial

Policies

3. Economic

Infrastructure

5. Social and

Political

Consequences

4. Financial

Consequences

Figure 1—1. Ardant’s Model of a State

In his other Works, Ardant has paid considerable attention to the

impact of financial policy on economic infrastructure, for example,

through the tendency of taxation in money to drive self—sufficient

peasants into the market. Here, that connection remains almost un-

touched. Again he is aware of the way that the existing economic in-

frastructure affects governmental goals, the essay in this volume

does not deal systematically with that relationship. The diagram rep—

[53]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING,

resents the causal sequence he stresses in his argument: from goals

to policies to consequences, and then back again to goals.

For purposes of analysis, Ardant generally takes the goals and the

economic infrastructure as given. What interests him is the effect

of matching or mismatching financial policy with infrastructure. Or-

dinarily he considers a match to occur when the policy brings the

state a high return over the medium and long runs without de-

terring production. To be sure, he insists that fiscal systems defined

and limited by public law work better than capricious force does.

With Balzac (in Cousine Bette) we hear him saying, “L’arbitraire,

c’est la démence du pouvoir” (“arbitrary rule is power gone mad”).

He also thinks that in the long run an egalitarian and redistributive

policy is not only more just but more effective. However, neither be-

lief appears to be-e'ssential to his main argument.

The argument centers on the assertion that a policy apportioning

fiscal obligations according to access to wealth tends to produce a

high return at low political, social and economic cost to the extent

that (I) marketing is extensive and intensive 5 (2) the fiscal rules are
known, binding on the state and widely considered to be equitable,

and (3) the economy is productive. Much of Ardant’s historical

analysis consists of comparing England, Prussia, the Hapsburg pos—

sessions and France in these regards: comparing them with the

ideal, with themselves at other points in time, and with each other.

France is the prime case under discussion, although at many points

England provides the standard against which the others are meas-

ured. Only at the end does it become clear that the real point of the

comparative analysis is to produce lessons for the guidance of con-

temporary states.

Nevertheless, Ardant makes several fundamental historical obser—

vations on his way to the lessons. The first, which only comes an pa:-

sant, echoes Finer: the largest and most persistent stimulus to in-

creases or changes in national fiscal burdens over the great period

of European state-making was the effort to build armed forces and

wage war. The second observation goes beyond Finer: over that

same period, the most serious and persistent precipitant of violent

conflicts between European state-makers and the populations they

attempted to rule were attempts to collect taxes. Third, in the early

period of state-making the most important single spur to the expan-

sion and reorganization of oH-icialdom was very likely the effort to

[54]CHARLES TI LLY

collect taxes from a recalcitrant population; the less extensive the

market, the more heterogeneous the population and the greater the

demand for revgnges relative to total production, in Ardant’s analy-

sis, the greater ”bulk of the governmental apparatus created in the

process. Finally, and most controversially, the pressure to extend the

suffrage, increase national consciousness, give representation to the

working classes, and generally draw the bulk of the national popula-

tion into political life, which so marked the nineteenth century in

Europe, came to an important degree from the fiscal demands of the

great military and administrative machines brought into being by

the Napoleonic Wars. We shall return to some of these conclusions

later on.

BRAUN ON TAXATION AND SOCIO-POLITICAL STRUCTURE

Rudolf Braun adopts a rather different approach to taxation from

that of Gabriel Ardant. He devotes himself more assiduously to the

construction of a continuous account of fiscal policies in England

and Brandenburg-Prussia from the sixteenth century onward. He is

much more concerned to pin down the differences between the two

countries, and to explain them in historical terms. Whereas Ardant

emphasizes the obstacles to the success of different kinds of fiscal

policies and the respects in which the economic infrastructure con-

strained the system of taxation, Braun usually begins with the politi-

cal situation which led the British or German rulers to adopt a given

set of policies at a given time, then takes the existence of that set of

policies as a fact whose long-run consequences become the focus of

historical investigation.

The trouble with conducting such an analysis through the com-

parison of two countries is that such a large number of other differ—

ences between them are plausible candidates for the exPlanation of

the diiferences which interest the analyst. In the contrast between

the economic histories of England and Brandenburg-Prussia, we

have a larger number of interesting candidates than we can possibly

handle: the power of the Junkers in Prussia, the greater urbanity of

England, the nature of war on the Continent and in England, the

variety of agricultural regions within England, the wool trade versus

the grain trade, the enclosures versus the “new serfdom,” and so on.

Given this complexity, one can try to eliminate potentially crucial

variables one at a time by intensifying the comparisons and increas-

[55]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING,

ing their range in time and space; or one can try to detect differences

in the configurations of the variables. Braun chooses the con-

figurations.

He pays particular attention to three classes of long-run conse-

quences of fiscal policy: (I) the kind of national administrative

structure it created; (2) its influence on patterns of political power

and participation; (3) its impact on economic growth. In this analy-

sis, he deals with the third variable as an outcome of the first two,

the direct influence of alternative systems of taxation on investment,

saving, factor mobility, etc., hardly figures in his analysis. (Else—

where, I hasten to add, Braun has shown that he is splendidly capa-

ble of dealing with the impact of economic growth on administrative

structure, political power and participation.) We get a picture of a

Prussian state smothering the economy with its bulk and strangling

the economy with its extractiveness. The English state, to oversimplify

Braun’s subtle account, escaped its evolution in the same di—

rection through a civil war which destroyed the prospering royal

bureaucracy.

Here we come upon an historical point which recurs elsewhere in

our papers. With the later Tudors and the Stuarts, the English

crown was acquiring strength and bulk in ways which resembled the

state-building of the continental countries. Although J. P. Cooper

complains about the tendency to assimilate English kingship of the

early seventeenth century to the absolutism of Spain or Branden-

burg-Prussia, he eventually suggests

that England was well aware of continental political patterns

and there were at least the possibilities of similar developments

under the early Stuarts, even the parliamentary sphere, if the

attempts of Salisbury and Cranfield to solve the crown’s prob-

lems had been successful, the similarities with other assemblies

might have been greater. But in fact the Civil War, though in

some ways a reflection of forces generally at work in Europe,

finally consolidated a pattern very different from that of most

European states (Cooper 1960: 90).

The Civil War consolidated a pattern of government by Parliament

in alliance with the notables of city and country. But in the previous

century, the ability of the Tudors to draw substantial returns from

their own domains had reduced their dependence on Parliament,

[56]CHARLES TI LLY

just as the Hohenzollern monarchs were later to benefit politically

from their ability to draw 40 or 50 percent of the government’s reve—

nues directly from the royal domain. This partial independence be—

came crucial to royal power; Estates and Parliaments everywhere

in Europe used their approval or disapproval of taxes (uncollecta-

ble without their collaboration until and unless the crown disposed

independently of strong military forces) to secure ratification of

their own privileges and to resist the penetration of the royal bu-

reaucracy into their own Spheres of influence. As Braun shows, that

process went on both in Britain and in Brandenburg-Prussia. Even

in autocratic Prussia, the eminent domain of the crown tended to

stop at the gates of the Junker estate, the institution of the rural

commissioner (Landmt) only nominally incorporated the nobility

into the vast centralized structure of government.

This way of putting it, however, slightly miscasts Braun’s analysis.

It suggests a royal authority alone against the World, when in both

Britain and Brandenburg-Prussia the class alliances of the crown

(and against the crown) were crucial. The tracing of fiscal policy in

Brandenburg-Prussia permits us to see the great landlords allying

with electors and kings to milk the weakened cities in one way, ex-

ploit the helpless peasantry in another way, reinforce their privi-

leged position in a whole variety of ways. For all the wider base of

taxation in England, there we find the great English landlords using

their influence in the counties to tilt assessments of the land tax away

from themselves, and their influence in Parliament to assure such

measures as the bounty on exports of grain.

Braun barely mentions another feature of the early modern states

that resulted from the search for eXpedients and alliances which all

monarchs had to pursue: what appears (in our virtuous retrospect)

to be their extensive corruption and waste. H. R. Trevor-Roper of-

fers a collective sketch:

So “the Renaissance State” consisted, at bottom, of an ever—ex—

panding bureaucracy which, though at first a working bureauc—

racy, had by the end of the sixteenth century become a para-

sitic bureaucracy; and this ever-expanding bureaucracy was

sustained on a equally expanding margin of “waste”: waste

which lay between the taxes imposed on the subject and the rev-

enue collected by the Crown. Since the Crown could not afford

an absolute loss of revenue, it is clear that this expansion of the

[57]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE—MAKING .

waste had to be at the expense of society. It is equally clear that

it could be borne only if society itself were expanding in wealth

and numbers (Trevor-Roper 1967: 68).

The waste included the open magnificence of the Renaissance court,

the conduct of costlier wars, and the ever—present payoffs, bribes,

sinecures, or outright thefts which drained away the payments theo-

retically exacted for public ends.

Trevor-Roper concludes that the Renaissance state destroyed it-

self in the seventeenth century by pushing its exactions beyond any

capacity of the population to support them. That argument dovetails

nicely with Ardant’s insistence on the centrality of fiscal questions

in the frequent rebellions of the seventeenth century. Then Braun

and Ardant alike part company with Trevor-Roper. They consider

the farming of taxes, the sale of oflices, the private handling of royal

loans, the enrichment of favorites and financiers to have been almost

inescapable consequences of the search for expedients to extend the

monarch’s power. They attach a relatively small quantitative role to

conspicuous consumption as such, and trace the greatest demand for

new funds back to the royal efforts to wage war and strengthen their

armed forces. The war-making efforts of the Hohenzollerns, the

weaker economic base of eastern Germany, the established power

of the Junkers combined to produce a far greater extractive appara-

tus in Brandenburg-Prussia—the coupling of the War State with the

Police State.

BAYLEY 0N POLICE

That is the point of contact between the studies of taxation and

David Bayley’s analysis of policing. This historical junction is not

overly clear, because Bayley concentrates on the period during

which differentiated, professional police forces were forming in Eu-

ropean states: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our analysts

of taxation have much more to say about the seventeenth and eight-

eenth centuries. What is more, Bayley takes a deliberatively retro-

spective View of his problem; he asks himself what accounts for na-

tional differences in police forces which are visible in our own times.
None of our other authors concentrates so much on present-day out—

comes. Finally, Bayley lays out his analysis in a timeless proposition-

al style, relating specific dependent variables—the scope of police

tasks, the structure of police forces, the nature of accountability, the

[58]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING'

within their territories and on the general approaches to state-mak-

ing they had developed; in both regards, the forms of alliance

among state officials, landlords and merchants were crucial. In their

turn, the choices of food policies cemented the class coalitions with

which the state entered the modern era, affected the success of its

fiscal policy by accelerating or impeding the commercialization of

agriculture, augmented or diminished the bulk of the national bu-

reaucracy, promoted or hindered economic growth, and governed

the form and severity of conflicts over control of the food supply.

The cumulative weight of all these choices produced striking na—

tional differences in patterns of regulation. Toward the end of the

eighteenth century we can see an England far on the road to a na-

tional market and to agrarian capitalism, entrusting such regulation

of the domestic market as still went on to the justices of the peace,

and giving subsidies to exporters of grain. By contrast, we see a

Spain enmeshed in a great web of protective regulation, a France

striving energetically but inconsistently to “free the grain trade” and

assure deliveries to its great cities, a Brandenburg—Prussia with an

enormous regulative machinery geared to the supply of the armed

forces. Over the very long run, we can also see what appears to be

a general trend in the European state-building experience: a move-

ment away from relatively similar forms of organization in the four-

teenth or fifteenth century to a great diversity of solutions in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, followed by a certain amount

of convergence on the same standard forms of mechanisms during

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

FISCHER AND LUNDGREEN ON ADMINISTRATIVE

AND TECHNICAL PERSONNEL

That double movement of early divergence and late convergence

also appears in the recruitment and training of technical personnel,

as portrayed by Fischer and Lundgreen. In comparing the experi-

ences of Britain, France, and Prussia over the entire period since the

Middle Ages, they discover an evolution from relatively similar ar-

rangements of personnel among the protostates, to increasing nation-

al differences in solutions to broadly similar problems during the

epic phases of state-making, to extensive borrowing and standardiza-

tion of organization in the bureaucratic expansion of the last century

or so. Fischer and Lundgreen interpret the term “technical person-

nel” broadly. So they must, to deal with the changing salience of dif-

[62]CHARLES TI LLY

ferent sorts of attributes and skills over the centuries they survey.

At one time or another, all European state-makers had to create, co-

opt or subjugate judges, soldiers, local administrators, tax collectors,

engineers, accountants, spies, demographers, scribes, sea captains,

bankers, policemen, and propagandists. Which mattered most changed

from one decade to the next.

Fischer and Lundgreen insist on the dilemma of loyalty versus

effectiveness. Many governments have had servants who were

neither effective nor loyal. A few have had servants who were both

effective and loyal. Yet the two virtues do not necessarily coincide,

especially in the short run. And the government which does not as-

sure itself a minimum of both does not survive.

In the earlier phases of European state-making, loyalty ( at least

in the sense of some guarantee that oflicials would not appropriate

all the resources entrusted to them, and would not become the

ruler’s rivals) posed the more pressing problems. That was true for

two main reasons: ( 1) every aspirant builder of a strong and auton-

omous state in Europe found himself surrounded by serious rivals,

both inside and outside the territory currently under his control; his

dissatisfied underlings could often find better allies elsewhere, (2)

the early rulers had little autonomous coercive power at their dis—

posal; they could not hope to raise armies, collect taxes, or even

maintain their dynasties without the assent of powerful organiza-

tions which even in principle were largely independent of the ruler.

These conditions affect every government to some degree, they con-

stituted the central facts of political life for the early European state-

makers.

This situation, as Fischer and Lundgreen say, helps explain the

prominence of churchmen as political aides to the early state-makers.

It is not just that the church monopolized literacy, legal acumen and

formal education. Clerics were useful partners because they brought

some of the resources of Europe’s largest and wealthiest organiza—

tion to bear on their work, they found it more difficult than did their

brothers the soldiers and landlords to convert the state resources

under their control into transmissible private property. They were

also less apt to build their own rival dynasties. (These are relative

matters, the Borgias did, of course, supply more than their share of

bishops and popes; Cardinal Mazarin did, indeed, die wealthy, with

his kinsmen well-placed.) However, alliances with churchmen and

the church eventually placed serious limits on kingly autonomy. With

[63]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

the obvious exception of the Papal States, all the European states

shifted decisively toward lay administrators as their autonomous coer-

cive power increased.

Yet the dilemma of loyalty and effectiveness persisted. Loyalty

took a long time to become commonplace. Fischer and Lundgreen

suggest that most of the salient features of official recruitment dur—

ing the great periods of state-making in Britain, France and Prussia

resulted from more or less deliberate compromises between the two

principles. The sale of offices occurred widely in all three countries,

especially with regard to military commissions; the distinction of

France was to have used that sale as an important source of govern-

ment revenue, instead of simply tolerating traflic in oflices among

private individuals. Although the venality of oflices diminished the

ability of the state to assign positions according to technical com-

petence, it also expanded the number of people who had a lively in—

terest in the state’s survival. Kings followed one of C. Northcote

Parkinson’s prime principles; they multiplied subordinates, not

rivals.

The co-optative procedure operated quite generally. Fischer and

Lundgreen point out the extent to which the apparently rationalized

and centralized system of Prussian territorial administration grew

from the bottom up, with local notables assuming office before the

middle levels of administration took shape, and ratified the existing

distribution of power, both by putting selection of the Landrat in the

hands of a region’s landlords and by giving the positions allotted to

the landed elite extraordinary precedence within the bureaucratic

rank order. Thus they identify some interesting parallels between

Britain and Prussia: in both countries the central power carried out

a great deal of its work through the partial integration of existing

local elites into the state structure. But the manner of integration—

for example, through hierarchically arranged offices—had enormous

political impact at a later historical stage. Although the French em-

ployed similar procedures in the early phases of subordinating the

whole country to royal control, once the kings had substantial mili—

tary forces at their disposal they turned increasingly to the imposi-

tion of orders by outsiders directed from the center.

On the other side, Fischer and Lundgreen observe that a number

of recruitment systems which appear to reward merit, skill and

knowledge actually confirm the hold of a particular class on a set of

public offices. The most striking example is Prussia, where the famed

[64]CHARLES TILLY

eighteenth-century “tightening of standards” strengthened the nobil-

ity’s claim to high oHice. Through the expansion of military service

and the increasing recruitment of civil servants from the army, the

reinforcement of the Junker position within the army may well have

increased the aggregate influence of their class. But it did so at the

cost of their autonomy as a group.

Likewise, when Fischer and Lundgreen reconsider the famous

supplanting of oflicers (independent representatives of traditional

and particularist forces) by commissars (new agents dependent on

the king’s centralizing will) in France, they have to observe that the

commissars came very largely from the same social classes—indeed

the same families and career lines——as the oflicers. Once again what

changes is not the class base of a government but the political auton-

omy of the classes in question. Only with the emergence of the tech

nically trained functionary after 1750 or so, they tell us, do we find

government service opening up as a major channel of social mobil-

ity. Even there we find the training and the recruitment procedures

perpetuating a style and spirit established by the old elite.

Perhaps without intending it, Fischer and Lundgreen raise doubts

about the administrative superiority of disciplined, autonomous bu-

reaucracies, as such, over other means of government. But they con—

firm the significance of the political choices European states made

in creating difierent sorts of staffs to carry on their work. They note,

for example, that governmental control over access to technical knowl-

edge was extreme in Prussia, moderately great in France, slight in

Britain—a difference which probably influenced the timing and

character of industrialization in the three countries, and certainly af-

fected their relative reliance on private corporations, citizen com-

missions and the like for the solution of public problems. They fill

out our picture of an army pervading a population in Prussia, a co-

alition of landlords and merchants checking royal power in England,

and a civilian central authority achieving remarkable autonomy (at

the cost of vulnerability to revolution) in France. Despite the con-

vergence in administrative structures due to common problems and

mutual modeling since 1800, the choices made in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries still mark these countries.

ROKKAN ON DIMENSIONS OF STATE FORMATION AND NATION-BUILDING

With Stein Rokkan, we turn to an extraordinary generalization of

the variables underlying such international difierence. Doubly ex-

[65]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKINGY

traordinary because efforts of this kind are rare, because this effort

is rich and stimulating. Rokkan offers a model of the full—fledged

nation—state (central control, standard culture, mass political partici-

pation, extensive redistributive activity). He converts the model into

a set of phases resembling those a number of other scholars have

proposed: penetration, standardization, participation, and redistribu-

tion. He asks himself what accounts for variations in the loci, tim-

ing, and political outcome of these phases within Europe. That leads
him to devise several conceptual matrices. The fundamental matri-

ces are schematic maps of Europe 5 in them large geographic varia-

tions in strategic position, culture, and social structure replace strict

linear distance.

As Rokkan says himself, the very nature of the exercise fills the

paper with contestable generalizations. One can easily argue, for

example, with Rokkan’s treatment of England and France as broadly

similar cases of close interaction between urban and rural economic

elites, or with his classification of Savoy with Prussia among the

powers making major conquests “inward towards the center of

Western Europe.” Ultimately such judgments will have to stand up

to critical scrutiny. For the scheme to be worth using in the interim,

however, it is sufficient that there be an approximate fit among the

reality, the specific judgments, and the general scheme. It is rare

enough to find a general developmental scheme containing verifiable

propositions rather than recurrent tautologies. It is rarer still to find

one which simultaneously yields statements about the system as a

whole, deals with the full range of variation, and provides unex-

pected hypotheses concerning the individual instances. Rokkan’s

scheme does. The present form of the scheme is complicated. The

numerate reader, however, will not have much difliculty imagining

it as a simple set of simultaneous equations.

Rokkan provides some constants for the equations in the form of

common background characteristics which constrained the emer—

gences of states everywhere in Europe: the residual influence of the

Roman Empire, the presence of the Catholic Church, the precedent

of the autonomous Germanic kingdoms, the continental web of

cities, the general growth of the feudal and manorial structure, the

early emergence of vernacular literatures. True, internal variation

with respect to these features of the European experience made

some difference to the development of states in different parts of Eu-

[66]CHARLES TI LLY

rope. But within a world perspective these are special properties of

European state-making as a whole.

Within the European area, Rokkan brings out several dimensions

of variation which generally lie hidden in our other papers: (I) geo-

political position, (2) urbanity, (3) concentration of landholdings;

and (4.) homogeneity with respect to language and religion. Most

of the time he is simply showing that the diverse European experi-

ences do fit Without great distortion into the four-dimensional space

defined by these variables, and that in combination these four varia—

bles yield a plausible account of the geographic pattern of state

making. The implicit argument, however, goes something like this:

on functional grounds only a limited number of the large set of pos-

sible combinations of these variables could yield viable states; where

rulers attempt to build states in the absence of one of these viable

combinations, their efforts will fail in characteristic ways; each via-

ble combination will produce a somewhat different but predictable

historical sequence and outcome; nevertheless, these controlling con-

ditions do change slowly with time, and are manipulable to some ex-

tent, so the geographic pattern shifts in the long run.

This line of reasoning appears in Rokkan’s interesting analysis of

the slowness of the urbanized region running between Amsterdam,

Copenhagen, and Palermo to produce substantial, centralized areas.

He considers that the multiplicity of trade-linked cities made it easy

for the elites of that region to pool resources in temporary coalitions

and federations, and just as easy to band together against the

achievement of preponderance by any one of their number. Al—

though a few federations and a few mini-states in the region sur-

vived the crystallization of a state system over Europe as a whole,

the unifying conquests came from outside. The expansion of Prussia

from an eastern base played an important part. The conquests of

Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna which settled their outcome

gave the last major shoves to the formation of a complete European

state system. To an important degree, they cleared the way to a

unified Germany and a unified Italy.

The instances of Germany and Italy bring out one of the more

intriguing complexities in Rokkan’s scheme. For purposes of com-

parative analysis, how should we set the phases and timing of the

state-building? Relatively old states lay at the core of each: Branden-

burg-Prussia in Germany, Savoy-Piedmont in Italy. Yet Rokkan’s

[67]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING,

treatment of Germany and Italy as nineteenth—century creations leads

him to conclude that they faced a “cumulation of crises” of penetra-

tion, standardization, and participation. The plausibility of the argu—

ment depends heavily on what we regard as the unit of analysis:

Savoy or Italy?

Indeed, the case of Italy identifies the two most embarrassing dif-

ficulties in applying a developmental-phase model like Rokkan’s to

the building of states: (I) If the “phases” can appear simultaneous-

ly, repeatedly or in diEerent orders, do they actually constitute more

than the elements of a definition of the modern state? (2) What is

the unit which passes through these phases? The difficulties become

even more acute when one notices (as does Rokkan) that a number

of changes tended to occur at the same time over the whole range of

European states, old and new; military innovations are the arche—

type of these roughly simultaneous changes.

In fact, Rokkan calls attention more directly than any of our other

authors to the interaction and interdependence of the changing Eu-

ropean states, to the sense in which they formed an operating sys-

tem. Economically, the industrial North and West fed on the

agrarian South and East. Politically, territorial consolidation pro-

ceeded at the peripheries of the system rather than at its center. By

the end of the eighteenth century the major states were implicitly

collaborating in dividing all of Europe into a limited number of sov—

ereign states. What is more, their colonial expansion was spreading

the territorial pattern (minus sovereignty) over the rest of the

world. By the twentieth century almost the entire world was

mapped into well-defined territories which were nominally sov—

ereign, or destined to be so. Struggles over the territory which was

to belong to one state or another became rare. (Yes, territorial dis-

putes like those separating India and Pakistan, India and China,

Israel and Egypt, or China and the Soviet Union in the 19605 and

19703 still occur, but they have become rare as compared to their

prevalence in the nineteenth century.) The main options open to the

new state-makers were (I) to occupy the whole territory allotted to

them or (2) to break it—or let it break—into smaller states.

Not that this implicit international agreement makes everything

easy for contemporary state-makers. It simply changes the nature of

their problems. Rokkan’s concluding balance sheet offers a bleak

outlook for the states acquiring nominal sovereignty after World

[68]CHARLES TILLY

War II. It also specifies how the contemporary acquisition of influ-

ence over remote parts of the world by Washington, Moscow, or

Peking differs from the earlier territorial expansion of 3. France or

a Prussia. Empire there is, but in the form of power relations among
formally independent states whose territorial integrity almost all

other states collaborate to maintain. The struggle shifts to control

over the country’s economic resources, its public ideology, its foreign

relations, and thence to the personnel of government.

These changes enter Rokkan’s argument as a set of models, con-

tacts and pressures from outside the new state. The pressures are

more powerful by far than those operating during the great periods

of European state-building. The European state-makers constructed,

then imposed, strong national governments before mass politics be-

gan. In new states, the two processes tend to occur together. That is

the “cumulation of crises” already anticipated by the experiences of

Germany and Italy.

The reasons that mass politics now arrives so early in a state’s life,

according to Rokkan’s paradigm, almost all have to do with changes

in the international system. They are the “high and diversified”

pressures from such major centers as London, Paris, Washington,

Moscow, and Peking, the “increasing exposure of masses to outside

communication,” the readily available models of universal suffrage

politics, and so on. A skeptic might grumble that the court of Frederick

the Great, after all, spoke French, or that the fine hands of the

Hapsburgs were to be seen everywhere in sixteenth-century Europe.

The fundamental fact—a decided drift toward dependency and

interdependence in the twentieth century—would nevertheless re-

main. Ultimately Rokkan faces us with a paradox: the very interna-

tional system which eases the creation of new states within the re-

maining niches in the world map reduces the likelihood that the new

state-makers will either retain their personal power or create the

sorts of acquiescent, nationalistic populations their European prede-

cessors fashioned for themselves.

Recurrent Theme:

Rokkan’s survey touches on almost all of the themes which recur

throughout the other papers. Their recurrence does not, of course,

prove that they are intrinsimlly important—only that they are im-

portant to us. We hardly claim to have arrived at our estimates of

[69]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE~MAKINGY

importance independently. Nonetheless the common themes deserve

mention as pointers toward the general conclusions concerning state-

making which one can properly draw from the whole body of papers.

WHAT ARE STATES?

Our seminar did not spend much time discussing definitions. We

did not try to legislate a common definition of the state. Sometimes

we came to sharp disagreement about the appropriate criteria.

(Bayley, in particular, objects to the idea of “stateness” broached

earlier in this chapter.) Nevertheless, in their work our authors lean

toward a narrow definition of the state. Within the whole historic

range of political institutions, they concentrate on a smaller set than

Joseph Strayer ( I970) sweeps together with his criteria of durabil-

ity, spatial fixity, 'permanent and impersonal institutions, final au-

thority, and loyalty. Within the whole range of social relations, they

single out what Ralph Miliband (1969) calls the government rather

than that entire power structure he calls the “state system.”

Finer is more explicit. In his view, a “modern state” is an organiza-

tion employing specialized personnel which controls a consolidated

territory and is recognized as autonomous and integral by the agents

of other states. For the most part, Finer and the rest of our authors

converge implicitly on the notion of stateness: an organization which

controls the population occupying a defined territory is a state in J0

far a: (I) it is differentiated from other organizations operating in

the same territory; (2) it is autonomous, (3) it is centralized; and

(4) its divisions are formally coordinated with one another.

Today’s governments difier considerably on each of these dimen-

sions. But over the last five centuries the world as a whole has moved

decisively toward “stateness.” Thus the processes bringing states into

being in Western Europe were: consolidation of territorial control,

differentiation of governments from other organizations, acquisition

of autonomy (and mutual recognition thereof) by some govern-

ments, centralization and coordination. Our authors find the devel-

opment of national consciousness, participation and commitment—-

“nation-building”-———interesting and important. They exclude it, how-

ever, from the definition of the state. They argue that in Europe it

generally occurred after the formation of strong states, and by no

means as a direct or automatic consequence of state-building alone.

In short, they insist on the analytic separation of state-building from

[70]CHARLES TI LLY

nation—building, and consider the nation-state only one of several

possible outcomes of state-building.

THE HIGH COST OF STATE-BUILDING

Explicitly, our authors agree that the building of states in Western

Europe cost tremendously in death, suffering, loss of rights and un-

willing surrender of land, goods, or labor. Implicitly, they agree that

the process could not have occurred without great costs. (However,

we do not agree so completely on the minimum costs it Would have

taken, on how much the actual costs exceeded the minimum, and for

what reasons, or on the extent to which the benefits outweighed the

costs, all these judgments contain large moral and larger speculative

components.) The fundamental reason for the high cost of European

state-building was its beginning in the midst of a decentralized,

largely peasant social structure. Building differentiated, autono-

mous, centralized organizations with effective control of territories

entailed eliminating or subordinating thousands of semiautonomous

authorities. If our analysis of armed forces is correct, most of the

enormous cost of military activity—by far the largest single cost of

state-making—sprang from the effort to reduce rivals inside and out-

side the territory. Building states also entailed extracting the

resources for their operation from several million rural communities.

If our analyses of taxation and food supply are correct, European

states could not have acquired much more power than they had at

the beginning of the seventeenth century without collaborating in

the destruction of the landed peasantry. In any case, they did

collaborate.

Most of the European population resisted each phase of the crea-

tion of strong states. Our analyses of taxation, of food supply, and

(less directly) of policing show that the resistance was often con-

certed, determined, violent, and threatening to the holders of pow-

er. The prevalence of tax rebellions, food riots, movements against

conscription, and related forms of protest during the great periods

of state-making help gauge the amount of coercion it took to bring

people under the state’s effective control. Even if we consider that

the arrival of eEective policing greatly increased the day-to—day se-

curity of the average individual, we shall have to weigh that against

the coercion the average individual endured along the way, and the

long-run increase in his exposure to death and destruction through war.

[71]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING.

The incompatibility of the old European peasant social organiza—

tion with extensive state-building comes out most clearly in the inter-

dependence of financial resources without extensive production for

the market. It is true that Postan ( I954.) has long since warned us

against treating “the rise of a money economy” as a general and con-

tinuous feature of European experience. It is also true, as Rokkan

points out, that the larger European states first grew up outside the

most intensely commercialized zone of the continent, the urban band

from Flanders and the Baltic ports down into Italy. Intensive mar—

keting did not cause states; it may even have inhibited their forma-

tion. If Ardant is right, furthermore, the less commercialized the

economy, the more exhaustive the extractive apparatus the state has

to mount to get the same return, hence the bulkier the state as such.

Yet within such existing states, commercialization facilitated the flow

of revenues to the governments. Regions (or periods) of minimal

trade blocked governmental efforts to extract resources and carry

on expensive tasks. That is one of the main connections Fernand

Braudel (1949, 1966) has in mind when he traces the rise and fall of

states around the Mediterranean to large swings in the European

economy.

In Europe, commercialization and the destruction of the peasantry

occurred largely as a consequence of the spread of capitalist prop-

erty relations and production. Our papers bring out the considerable

historical connection between the rise of national states and the ex-

pansion of capitalism, especially its agrarian varieties. They do not

give us grounds for concluding that the connection was intimate or

ineluctable, since early capitalist ventures like the Hanse were quite

foreign to state-making, and since early strong states like Spain and

France formed outside the principal centers of capitalism. The his-

torical connection had two sides: (I) the expansion of capitalism

freed the resources which state-makers captured for national ends,

the consolidation of previously fragmented property rights in land,

for example, facilitated its taxation; and (2) the growth of cities and

of industrial production (often outside the cities) in southern Eng-

land, Flanders, the Rhineland, northern Italy, and elsewhere in

Western Europe produced profitable markets for big agricultural

producers elsewhere in Europe, incentives for landlords to hasten

the creation of a docile, land-poor labor force, and conditions for po-

litiml alliance between great landlords and aspirant state-makers.

With variations running from the extensive proletarianization of

[72]CHARLES TI LLY

Midlands England to the “new serfdom” of Poland and Prussia, that

alliance became one of the staples of European state-making.

C. B. Macpherson (1962) has proposed a third relationship be-

tween expanding capitalism and the European brand of state-mak—

ing: the elaboration of a political theory of “possessive individual-

ism” modeled on the property relations of capitalism. Likewise Karl

Polanyi (1957) has linked the emergence of the new political and

moral doctrines more explicitly to the increasing dominance of the

market. Since our papers contain rather little discussion of doctrine,

they bear only indirectly on the validity of these arguments. Never—

theless, they suggest that the drift toward governmental adoption of

liberal doctrines—which was, in fact, widespread in Europe after

I750—grew not only from the accession of capitalists to political

power and the penetration of market relations into everyday life,

but also from the experience of statesmen seeking to put larger and

larger resources at the disposition of the state.

The relationship was reciprocal and complicated. The growth of

governmental staffs, the inflation of armies, the expansion of seats of

government, the incessant search for new revenues all contributed

in various ways to the drawing (or driving) of peripheral areas into

national markets, to urbanization, and to the extension of capitalist

property-relations. It remains debatable whether the extent of eco-

nomic regulation and the sheer weight of government slowed

economic growth in countries like Spain and Brandenburg-Prussia.

(Among our authors, Ardant and Braun tend to disagree on that

point.) The massive expenditure of resources on the military estab-

lishment may have drawn capital away from industry. The effect of

state-making on the later course of economic change was therefore

contingent. But it was powerful.

ARMIES, WARS, AND STATES

The formation of standing armies provided the largest single in—

centive to extraction and the largest single means of state coercion

over the long run of European state-making. Recurrently we find a

chain of causation running from (I) change or expansion in land

armies to (2) new efforts to extract resources from the subject popu-

lation to (3) the development of new bureaucracies and administra-

tive innovations to (4.) resistance from the subject population to (5)

renewed coercion to (6) durable increases in the bulk or extractive-

ness of the state. The chain stretched more tightly in some states

[73]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

than in others; the classic comparison sets military Prussia against

civilian England. Even in England, however, the building of a New

Model Army entailed the same series of effects.

These connections among state-making, the building of armed

forces, and the maintenance of internal control help account for the

tendency of revolutions to occur in conjunction with the preparation

and the termination of war. As Walter Laqueur says, “War appears

to have been the decisive factor in the emergence of revolutionary

situations in modern times; most modern revolutions, both successful

and abortive, have followed in the wake of war . . .” (Laqueur 1968:

501). Our papers identify tWO main paths to the revolutionary out-

come: (I) the exaction of men, supplies and—especially—taxes for

the conduct of war incites resistance from crucial elites or important

masses, the European revolutions of the I64os exemplify this pat-

tern; and (2) the absorption or weakening of a government’s repres-

sive capacity by war, coupled with a decline in the government’s

ability to meet its domestic commitments, encourages its enemies to

rebel, the Russian Revolution provides the type case. These are not

necessary, or even probable, effects of war-making. They are only

likely if the government seriously depletes its coercive reserves. The

paradox is that the building up of the government’s coercive capac-

ity for war sometimes has that very consequence, because it leads to

diversion, dilution, disloyalty or defeat of the forces destined for

domestic control.

Where the populations remained docile, wars still weighed heav-

ily. Joseph Strayer (1971: 3 39) tells us that the first powerful prece-

dent for general taxation by the crown came from the pope’s promo—

tion of forced contributions to finance the Third Crusade. Kings

were not slow in adapting that newly legitimized procedure to their

own secular military needs. Up to our own time dramatic increases

in national budgets, national debts, numbers of governmental em-

ployees or any other indicator of governmental scale in European

countries have occurred almost exclusively as a consequence of

preparations for war. The general rule, furthermore, has been for

some contraction in governmental scale to occur after a war—but

almost never a return to the prewar scale. Preparation for war has

been the great state-building activity. The process has been going on

more or less continuously for at least five hundred years.

At an international level wars and war settlements have been the

great shapers of the European state system as a whole. The Peace of

[74]CHARLES TILLY

Westphalia (164.8), the Congress of Vienna (I815), the Treaty of

Versailles (1919) and the provisional settlements ending World War

II produced incomparably greater realignments of the identities, re-

lations, and relative strengths of European states than any long pe—

riods of incremental change between them.

To be sure, some of these effects came after substantial delays; to

an important degree, Italy and Germany owed their existence as uni-

fied, independent states to the course and the settlement of the Na-

poleonic wars, but those two national states did not actually take

shape until decades later. The immediate state-making effects of the

Congress of Vienna were nonetheless profound: not only was France

shrunken to her nearly definitive borders, but the shrinking process

left behind a consolidated Prussia, a consolidated Austro—Hungarian

Empire, a Netherlands soon to split definitively into Belgium and

Holland, and a two-paneled European map, with the northwestern

panel headed for consolidation into a smaller and smaller number of

political units without much redrawing of the main national boun-

daries confirmed in I 815, and the southeastern panel headed for pro—

liferation through the breakup of the Ottoman and Austro-Hun-

garian Empires. Thus war shaped and reshaped the European state

system.

The consolidation of the state system also constricted the oppor-

tunities for the building of new. states by war. That shift lies behind

a paradox which many observers of contemporary state-making have

noticed: armies of new states which are unlikely ever to fight an in-
ternational war adopt the latest armaments, absorb the largest part

of the public revenues, employ their might in putting down dissi-

dents and guerrillas, play the parts of arbiters, king-makers and, on

occasion, kings, yet fail repeatedly in their efforts to transform the

social structure. That they have a “vested interest in the status quo”

is of course true . . . but so did the state-making monarchs who none-

theless transformed Europe.

The conventional explanations of militarism in contemporary

countries run to the ease with which military models (as opposed to

models of industrial production or of family structure) can be im—

ported by new states, the advantage of any army in a power vacuum,

and its special significance as the most “modern” institution in a poor

country, a major arena for education and communications, a likely

instrument for collective tasks running from canal-building to traflic

control. Our authors do not deny these eEects. Instead, they call

[75]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

attention to their placement within a distinctive twentieth-century in-

ternational structure: tremendous inequalities of military and eco-

nomic power, deliberate exportation of military models and assist-

ance by a handful of great powers, likely involvement of several of

the same great powers in any war anywhere, consequent irrelevance

of the small state’s military establishment to its pursuit of interna-

tional objectives by- means of war. As a result of this international

situation, military forces become favored links with (and instru-

ments of) the great powers, and become much freer than their pred-

ecessors to intervene in domestic politics. The building of substantial

armed forces, on the other hand, becomes much less likely to produce

the gradual subordination of the subject population, the transforma—

tion of the fiscal structure, the freeing and absorption of resources

that it did in the European seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Its state-making impact appears to have diminished and changed.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MULTIPLICITY

A state system embracing a relatively small number of partici-

pants emerged from centuries of contestation among what had once

been quite a large number of virtually independent political units.

The thousand state-like units spattering the political map of four-

teenth-century Europe dwindled to fewer than thirty by World War

I. E pluribm pauci might serve as the European motto. Further-

more, throughout the entire reduction process the European system

has included not one dominant power but a number of rivals. Un-

like much of the Roman or Chinese experience, the multiplicity of

medieval and postmedieval Europe almost always made it possible

for a coalition to form against the greater power which could over-

come that power alone. At an international level, the European politi-

cal process therefore entailed the constant formation and reforma—

tion of coalitions.

Multiplicity marked the European state-making process at a

smaller scale as well. In the earlier phases of state-making, every

aspiring ruler found himself surrounded by rivals—~even within the

territories he nominally controlled. Landlords who exercised nearly

autonomous control of their own estates (and thereby of most of the

resources necessary for the waging of war, the maintenance of

courts, and other stately tasks) rivaled and resisted the princes at

the local level. Great magnates, royal cousins, and neighboring

princes eased or elbowed their way into the prince’s own jurisdic-

[76]CHARLES TILLY

tion. In his essay on armed forces, Finer shows us how mortal a

threat the enemies of every prince posed. Successful state-makers

had to absorb, check, or destroy most of their immediate rivals.

The variant strategies they employed comprise much of the news

of this book. Yet some general features stand out: As a rule the Eu-

ropean monarchs of the great state-building period allied themselves

with the landlords of their territories, who received a certain license

to exploit their own shares of the land and the peasantry; LandOWn-

ers generally comprised the nerves of the armed forces, the core of

the coercion employed in crushing the early forms of resistance to

state-making, the bulk of local administration in nomine principis.

That princes should have formed such coalitions within the matrix

of feudal society does not surprise us much in retrospect. That it did

happen, nevertheless, hastened the subjugation of the vast mass of

peasant population to a state-landlord combine, left power in the

Estates even through the so-called age of absolutism, and facilitated

the eventual creation of a landless population through such devices

as enclosure.

One feature of this coalition process to which several of our

papers (notably that of Fischer and Lundgreen) call attention is the

co-optation of potential opponents of the state through apparently

antistate institutions like the sale of public office. Although France

provides the textbook case, most European monarchies at least tol— N" J

erated the sales of some substantial set of offices during sow 1 5.,

tary predominance and revolutions from above, While the opening I q ,3"

of the English alliance to the commercial classes cleared the way to F

liberal democracy. Here the implicit arguments of our papers join

the explicit arguments of Barrington Moore’s Social Origin: of Dic—

tators/zip and Democracy (1966). The alternatives of autocracy, de—

mocracy, federalism, or oligarchy which clearly differentiated Euro-

pean political systems in the nineteenth century were forming in the

class alliances made by the state-makers of the previous three

centuries.

HOMOGENEITY AND H ETEROGENEITY

Largely as a result of the previous unification under the Roman

Empire, European state-making began in a setting of considerable

cultural, homogeneity: in a world perspective, relatively little dis-

parity in language, kinship system, cosmology, religion, aesthetic

form, or even political tradition. This relative homogeneity no doubt

[77]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING

facilitated the movement of state-making models, ideologies, tech—

niques, and personnel from one area to another. As compared, for

example, with the cultural diversity of the Americas or Africa of the

time, fourteenth-century Europe provided a favorable setting for the

construction of substantial unified states.

Yet European state-making involved a further move toward homo-

geneity within states, along two criss-crossing paths: (1) via the de—

liberate attempts of state-makers to homogenize the culture of their

subject populations through lingEEElELL‘[Link]:

educational standardigation‘iwa‘ndfubstantial phase of their histories.

' Ini'iiEngl'a'fid salesmofdmajor oflices ended before 1700. Yet even then /

in the Exchequer, at least, sinecures abounded. Sir Robert

Howard, as bad an administrator as he. was poet, could not be

removed from his post as Auditor of the Exchequer, which he

i had bought and so held for life. His security permitted the lux- f

ury of political opposition to the King. The Exchequer also pro— l

vided a notable army of offices that were discharged by deputy,

and so provided outdoor relief for the lucky families that held

them. Few however, were as fortunate as the family of Walker,

who held the office of Usher of the Exchequer. It had been

granted this office in perpetuity by Henry II, and members of the ,L

family were still drawing their stipends in William III’s reign l

(Plumb 1967: 114).

For all their dead weight, offices of this kind generally committed

their holders to the continued existence of the government. Simi-

larly, the ceding of control over Prussian local government to the

regional landlords compromised the power of the state in principle,

but helped assure the collaboration of the Junkers in state’s exploita- 1

tion of the peasantry and the urban population. :

The form of class alliances thus worked out by the earlier state—

makers significantly affected the later political pattern of the state. .

, The coalition of crown, Junkers, and bureaucrats prepared Branden- J‘

5 burg-Prussia for! (fivia‘ffemmhose—smtefenflamh

tively homogeneous populations to survive and prosper, while those

containing wide cultural disparities tended to stagnate or to explode.

We need not exaggerate the resultant homogeneity; diversity is the

stock in trade of local historians in France, Germany, Italy, or Eng-

land: historical traditions, dialects, field systems, ethnic origins do

[78]CHARLES TI LLY

vary from region to region. In a large perspective, nevertheless, the

European state-making process minimized the cultural variation

wit/tin states and maximized the variation among states. Hence the

plausibility of doctrines of national self-determination to nineteenth-

century Europeans—just so long as they were not dealing with their

own ethnic/ religious minorities.

Why should homogeneity make any difference? Only the Fischer-

Lundgreen and Rokkan papers take up the issue. They suggest two

complementary reasons. First, a homogeneous population was more

likely to remain loyal to a regime of its own kind, just as it was more

likely to mount a successful rebellion against foreign domination.

Second, centralized policies of extraction and control were more like-

ly to yield a high return to the government (in terms of resources

returned by the subject population per unit of pressure exerted by

the government) where the population’s routine life was organized

in relatively uniform ways. There a single successful policy could

easily be generalized to all parts of a state. The more heterogeneous

the population, the more often a policy notably successful in one

place would fail utterly in another, and the more effort and person-

nel absorbed in the elaboration of alternative plans, and the greater

the relative payoff from policies which put a considerable share of

the available resources into the hands of local magnates and tradition-

al authorities. Hence the incentive of state-makers to homogenize.

Gabriel Ardant’s controversial argument about the fiscal incen-

tives for the extension of political participation takes the analysis one

phase further: into what has loosely been called “nation-building.”

Gabriel Almond and Bingham Powell distinguish between state—

building and nation-building in the following way:

We need some way of talking about these challenges which may

lead to political development, these changes in the magnitude

and content of the flow of inputs which put the existing culture

and structure under strain. As a beginning we may suggest four

types of problems for challenges to a political system. The first

of these is the problem of penetration and integration; we refer

to this as the problem of state-building. The second type of sys-

tem—development problem is that of loyalty and commitment,

which we refer to as nation-building. The third problem is that

of participation, the pressure from groups in the society for hav-

ing a part in the decision making of the system. And the fourth

[79]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING.

is the problem of distribution, or welfare, the pressure from the

domestic society to employ the coercive power of the political

system to redistribute income, wealth, opportunity, and honor

(Almond and Powell 1966: 3 5 ).

Ardant does not go as far into definitions as do Almond and Powell,

but he appears to have similar distinctions in mind. In these terms,

Ardant is asserting that beyond a certain level of state-building, the

builders found that they had to greatly increase the loyalty, commit-

ment, and acquiescence of the subject population (a nation-building

task) in order to expand state power and that only substantial in-

creases in participation would accomplish that objective; thus they

became Willing to_ accord much wider involvement in governmental

affairs to the general population; partly as a result of the expansion

of participation, according to Ardant, they found themselves increas-

ingly involved in distribution and redistribution. Of course, Ardant

concentrates on the fiscal aspect of these processes. By the very cen-

trality of fiscal activity in the operation of states, however, Ardant’s

argument has implications for the whole range of state work.

Our papers—on purpose—do not deal with nation-building nearly

so fully as with state-building. Therefore, they do not provide the

means for testing this portion of Ardant’s argument in detail. They

provide just enough mixed evidence and contrary argument to make

it clear that Ardant’s position is a controversial one. He attaches

great importance to the needs and plans of state-makers in account-

ing for the nineteenth-century broadening of participation in nation-

al politics. Other papers (notably Bayley’s, Rokkan’s, and my own)

work with a model of strong pressure from below and great resist-

ance from above, leading to a reluctant concession of political rights

and guarantees of different mobilized segments of the general pop-

ulation. The controversy is familiar. It is the theme of such distin-

guished books as Reinhard Bendix’s Nation-Building and Citizen—

s/zip (1964), T. H. Marshall’s Citizenship and Social Class (1950),

and E. E. Schattschneider’s The Semi-Sovereign People (1960). It

recalls the very old argument among political historians about the

relative weight of popular demands and of statesmen’s concessions

in the great nineteenth-century transformations of England or Italy.

Our papers lead up to that famous old question and connect it with

the logic of state-making. They do not resolve it.

[80]CHARLES TILLY

Why Europe Will Not Occur Again

The European state-building experiences will not repeat them-

selves in new states. The connections of the new states to the rest of

the world have changed too much. The statesmen of the contempo-

rary world find themselves faced with alternative models of state-

building, not to mention eager promoters of those models. The man-

ager of a contemporary state may well be ineffective and/or wrong,

but he is likely to assume the necessity of promoting an efficient and

submissive civil service, a general and uniform system of taxation,

a well—trained native military force, and a high level of industrial

production. In Europe of the fifteenth or sixteenth century the avail—

able models were fewer, different, less well-defined and less obvious—

ly appropriate for the objectives of the powerful.

Moreover, the European state-makers and a few non-European

collaborators, through war, conquest and alliance, eventually fash-

ioned a Worldwide system of states. As the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries have worn on, the newcomers to the system have had less

choice of the positions they would occupy in it, even down to the

exact territories they would control. Among other things, that prior

existence of a state system has fundamentally altered the role of the

military forces in the smaller states, since their strength or weakness

no longer makes the major difference in the territory controlled by

the state or in its relations with other states.

Again the resources on which today’s state-makers draw and the

forces against which they struggle are deeply different from those

of the early European experience. All the builders of European

states occupied themselves, one way or another, in wresting their

wherewithal from largely self—sustaining agrarian populations. They

could not borrow military might, technical expertise, or develop-

ment funds from neighboring states. They could not assume the

existence of a world market for any of their products, or the readi-

ness of their producers to respond to a world market if it existed.

They could not dispossess foreign capitalists (unless one wants to

press the analogy of the Catholic Church with Kennecott Copper).

They could not even nationalize the land. On the other hand they

could use their personal positions as suzerains and landlords to

bring men, food, and rents to the service of the crown; could forge

alliances with fellow landlords to assure the acquiescence of the

rural population in their grouping, and could drum up public funds

[81]ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN STATE-MAKING.

by such devices as selling oflices. Most of these conditions are entire-

ly gone and unlikely to return.

Finally, the managers of contemporary states have undertaken

different tasks from their predecessors: building a certain kind of

economic system, creating specific facilities like research institutes,

steel mills, airports, or holiday resorts, maintaining some minimum

of public welfare 5 promoting one variety of patriotism or another,

increasing the supply of scientists; and others. The new tasks flow in

part from the available models of state-building, in part from the

logic of the international system, in part from pressures within each

individual country. In this regard as well, our ability to infer the

probable events and sequences in contemporary states from an in-

formed reading of European history is close to nil.

The profundity' of all these changes might make worthless any in-

ference whatsoever from European experience to today’s world. The

authors of this volume take a slightly more sanguine View of the mat-

ter. We think there is a reasonable chance that some general rela-

tionships among the ways of building state power, the forms of re-

lationship between men and government, and the character of the

political institutions which emerge from the process of state-building

which held within the European world still hold today. There ap-

pears, for example, to be a strong and general connection between

the ultimate bulk of national governments and the extent of their

reliance on land armies in their formative periods. We propose a

number of hypotheses along these lines, and attempt to knit them

together: cautiously within our particular areas of competence in the

substantive essays on armed forces, police, taxation, and so on, a bit

more boldly in the synthetic essays.

The Plan of the Book

At its strongest points, our analysis will present well-founded hy-

potheses, not conclusions for the ages. The papers which follow are

serious; the authors have set themselves demanding questions, they

have tried hard to find the answers. Yet everyone of us feels the in-

completeness and imprecision of what he has to report. If level of

confidence is the measure, in fact, this book takes a step backward

from previous statements about “political development,” even to the

extent of putting the phrase itself into quotation marks. “Not so easy

as all that,” we frequently conclude. If we have made it clear why

[82]CHARLES TILLY

it is not so easy and what the possible alternatives to established doc-

trine are, that will have to do.

The papers themselves appear in a roughly descending order of

extractiveness: the most obviously extractive activities first. Samuel

Finer, a political scientist—historian, begins with a sweeping com-

parative analysis of the most expensive governmental activity of all:

the building and maintenance of armed forces. Gabriel Ardant, an

economist and economic historian, treats financial policy and eco—

nomic infrastructure, with a strong concentration on the means by

which states extracted resources from subject populations. Rudolph

Braun, a historian with strong sociological leanings, takes up many

of the same themes in a study focused on taxation in Britain and

Prussia. David Bayley, a political scientist previously known for his

work on new states, carries out a systematic comparison of police

systems in West European countries. Charles Tilly, a sociologist

who often works with historical materials, follows with a somewhat

less systematic survey of problems of food supply and the kinds of

conflicts they involved. Wolfram Fischer and Peter Lundgreen, so—

cial and economic historians, close the specialized essays with a com-

parative analysis of state involvement in the recruitment and train-

ing of various kinds of officials and technicians. Then we turn to two

general essays. Stein Rokkan, a political scientist with fingers in most

of the other social sciences, proposes a set of variables with which

to analyze the European experience of state-making and nation-

building. In the final essay, Tilly considers the implications of the

West European experience with states for existing theories of politi-

cal development and political decay.

[83]CHAPTER 2

STATE- AND NATION~BUILDING IN EUROPE:

THE ROLE OF THE MILITARY

SAMUEL E. FINER

\c‘c\o\o‘\u\e\o\c‘u‘o‘n“n‘c‘o“-\e‘\o‘\~‘\,n\o‘\.

Terminology

Just as there are four chief divisions of the mass of the popula—

tion—farmers, mechanics, shopkeepers and day-labourers—so

there are four kinds of military forces—cavalry, heavy infantry,

light armed troops, and the navy. Where the territory is suit-

able for the use of cavalry, there is favourable ground for the

construction of a strong form of oligarchy: the inhabitants of

such a territory need a cavalry force for security, and it is only

men of large means who can afford to breed and keep horses.

Where territory is suitable for the use of heavy infantry, the

next and less exclusive form of oligarchy is natural: service in

the heavy infantry is a matter for the well-to—do rather than for

the poor. Light armed troops, and the navy are wholly on the

side of democracy; and in our days—with light armed troops

and naval forces as large as they are—the oligarchical side is

generally worsted in any civil dispute . . . (Barker 1946: 271;

cf. also 160, 188).

Here Aristotle is linking three- variables: social stratification, style-

of-rule, and what I shall be calling the format of the military forces.
The number of variables involved is, in fact, more numerous than

this, for instance, the format of the military is determined by tech-

nological advances as well as by terrain, and technology takes us into

the sphere of the economy as a whole. Above all, the quotation sug—

gests a static relationship between format and the three styles-of-

rule. Now one of my objects is to discover what relationship existed

between the development of the modern state and the military

format. This posits a relationship between two processes—the devel-

opment of the modern state on the one side, the development of mil-

itary formats on the other.

I must, therefore, say what I mean by a modern state as contrasted

[84]SAMUEL E. FINER

with any other, and presumably, premodern forms; and say some—

thing more about this concept of format, on the other.

The literature suggests that the term—a “modern” state—can

mean rather different things to difierent authors. Lord Lindsay, for

instance, when he writes of The Modern Democratic State (Lindsay

1943) appears to be making an implicit distinction between this and

the states of classical antiquity. German authors, followed by such

scholars as Ernest Barker (Barker 1951: 1—17), evolved however a

complex classification of states: the so—called Stiindestaat of medieval

times, then the F firstemtaat, or the Princes’ State of the Renaissance,

then the Hausstaat, or Dynastic State, and so forth. In this View, a

“modern” state is that which emerged after the medieval ones.

Meanwhile classical concepts of “the state” such as Weber’s are of

little help for this inquiry which is genetic. For instance, in Weber’s

famous definition, that states are “human associations that success-

fully claim the monopoly of legitimate use of physical force within

a given territory,” every single key word begs the historical ques-
tion of when, at what particular date, the “state” can be said to have

emerged. The degree of success achieved by a government in claim-

ing the legitimate use of physical force, the completeness of its

monopoly of this, the assurance of its legitimacy, and the extent of

its territorial jurisdiction—every one of these fluctuated during the

last millennium, and every one admitted and still admits of degrees.

And so it becomes almost an arbitrary matter to say, “At this date,

the area once known as Re gnum F rancorum can be regarded as a

state.”

I propose to regard the modern European states as those that

emerged subsequent to the break up of the Roman polity, hence to

regard a medieval kingdom as a form of state and to regard the

process of state-building as something that took place between an

origin in the early Middle Ages and today. In that case, our contem-

porary states have, since their amorphous beginnings a thousand

years ago, acquired five salient characteristics.

1. Like all states by definition, they are territorially defined

populations each recognizing a common paramount organ of

government.

2. This paramount organ of government is subserved by special-

ized personnel; one, the civil service, to carry out decisions, the

other—the military service to back these by force where necessary

[85]MILITARY FORCES AND STATE-MAKING

and to protect the association from other similarly constituted

associations.

3. This state, so defined and characterized, is recognized by other

similarly constituted states as independent in its action upon its ter-

ritorially defined population, i.e., its subjects. This recognition con-

stitutes its international “sovereignty.”

4. Ideally at least, but to a large extent in practice also, the pop-

ulation of a state forms a community of feeling—a Gemeinsc/zaft—

based on self-consciousness of a common nationality.

5. Ideally at least and again to a large extent in practice, the pop-

ulation forms a community in the sense that its members mutually

distribute and’share duties and benefits.

The medieval forerunners of contemporary Britain, France, Ger-

many, and the like, possessed few or none of these characteristics.

But somewhere along the line of the second millennium A.D. each

acquired them to an extent which would permit us to assign to them

a recognizably contemporary form. But here it is desirable to dis-

tinguish between the first three and the last two of this set of five

characteristics. Albeit in England and, somewhat later, in France the

last two characteristics were slowly acquired even in the later Mid-

dle Ages, for the most part they are markedly later phenomena, de-

veloping fast and far only in the late eighteenth and in the nine-

teenth centuries. These last two characteristics are the ones typically

associated with nation-building, whereas the first three are charac-

teristic of state-building.

As can be inferred from the first and second characteristics, state-

building proper involves two major variables: territoriality and

function. (Item 3 is a derivative from these two.) In both these re—

spects the medieval state is anitipodal to the contemporary one. The

present territorial entity known as France was in the tenth century

a congeries of what at the highest we may style as minor and primi-

tive states, or at the lowest, a welter of competing jurisdictions.

Furthermore, whereas today political obedience is a simple function

of territorial location in that one owes allegiance to the government

of the territory in which one finds oneself, at that time political al-

legiance was a man-to-man relationship, and obedience might be

due, in different circumstances, to several overlords. Nor was there

any likelihood that these difierent claims upon the same individual

might not compete. Often, where these lords were in dispute, the

[86]SAMUEL E. FINER

vassal had to make up his own mind as to where his allegiance lay.

By the same arrangement of lordship and vassalage what today we

call public and private functions were at that time compounded to-

gether. As Mosca puts it (Mosca 1939: 81), “by ‘feudal state’ we

mean that type of political organization in which all the executive

functions of society—the economic, the judicial, the administrative,

the military—are exercised simultaneously by the same individuals,

while at the same time the state is made up of small social aggregates

each of which possesses all the organs that are required for self suf-

ficiency.” A medieval state as compared with a contemporary one,

was fragmented into many hands, and it was crisscrossed with over-

lapping and sometimes conflicting feudal and subfeudal obligations

and pockmarked with “liberties” and “immunities.” So territorially,

the medieval state was difierentiated. By contrast the public and the

private functions were consolidated in one and the same office or

individual.

In contrast the contemporary state consists of formerly differen-

tiated territories which have been brought together and whose pop-

ulations have become consolidated under the same common organ

of rule—be it prince, or dictator, or parliament. At the same time a

distinction has long been drawn between public and private rights

and duties, and by that token, between public officers and private

individuals. In brief, public and private services have become dif-

ferentiated, as shown in Figure 2-1.

TERRITORIALLY FUNCTIONALLY

MEDIAE VA L DIFFERENTIATED I CONSOLIDATED

CONTEMPORA R Y CONSOLIDATED DIFFERENTIATED

Figure 2—1. Development of the Contemporary State.

The twin process—from consolidated service to differentiated

service and from differentiated territory to consolidated territory—

is what constitutes the development of the modern state.

Not quite the whole of it, however. For if all contemporary states

tend to resemble one another in these two major respects, they may

differ from one another in their respective styles-of-rule. A contem-

porary state may be autocratic or representative; it may be central-

ized or decentralized; its laws may be homonomous or heter-

[87]MILITARY FORCES AND STATE-MAKING

onomous, i.e., divaricated according to areas or to functions within

the state. Now whereas the twin movement of state-building—from

consolidated to differentiated functions, and from differentiation of

territory to its consolidation—whereas this twin movement has been

on the whole regular, linear, and cumulative over the last thousand

years, the styles~of-rule have fluctuated.

Nation-building is not the same as state-building. The two have

both historical and logical connections. Populations which have been

consolidated under a common organ of government may thereby be

assisted in attaining the common consciousness (no matter the senti-

ments or facts on which this is founded), that is the precondition of

being a “nation.” In return, where such common sentiments or facts

of life are self-consciously felt by a population, this may be impelled

thereby to seek its own individual political organization, i.e., to make

its sense of community and its sense of political allegiance coincide.

The literature shows that like the “state” concept, the concept of

“nation” has been variously interpreted and two common ap-

proaches are often used without distinguishing between them. Yet

although they are both historically and logically connected, they are

distinct. For some, the sense of nationhood is popular participation

in matters affecting the whole population on the one side, and on the

other, an identity of benefits received from this association. It is in

this sense that the Abbé Sieyes defined the nation as being “A body

of associates living under common laws and represented by the same

legislative assembly.” (The emphases are the ones supplied by the

Abbé himself—not by me.) This notion contrasts with what some

German authors have called the so-called Stiindestaat or the later

“proprietary-territorial state” where the state as such was the

“property” not of all, but of its unequal orders (in the former in-

stance) or the prince and his court (in the latter). Here the concept

of nation—state is the concept of a state of “all the state’s population,

of the whole nation, in the name of natural rights and popular sov-

ereignty.” On the other hand, a nation can and has been defined as

a population conscious of its common mtionality—Englishness, Ger-

manness, and the like. The two concepts—citizenship with its impli-

cation of reciprocal rights and duties among the whole body of the

associates, or nationality in the sense of a community of ethnos and

a sense of shared destiny—are mutually compatible and also self-

supportive. Furthermore, insofar as the one embodies the notion of

the sovereignty of the people and the other, the notion of the par-

[38]SAMUEL E. FINER

ticularity of that people among other peoples, the two notions link

up both logically and in historical experience with the great princi-

ples of the French Revolution. “Equality” of rights in the common

association went hand in hand with “fraternity”—brotherhood in the

sense that all were equal parts of the same (and distinctive) human

family.

In either meaning, the root condition is community. Again in

either meaning, nation-building began earlier in England than it did

in France, and in France earlier than it did among the scattered ter-

ritories of the Hohenzollern dynasty into whose hand fate and con-

nubial blisses had by I618 delivered variegated strips of German—

speaking territory which later were to be consolidated and to be

known as Brandenburg-Prussia and later, just Prussia. For most of

the European continent, the phase of nation-building took its great

leap forward with the French Revolution and progressed outward

from that focus until today when its immense potentialities for

nation-building and, by the same token, for state-splitting have

reached outward to encompass hitherto little-known peoples of

brown, black, and yellow skins, throughout the former imperial ter-

ritories of the European great powers.

Let me turn now to the other key concept—that of military format.

It is to the changes in this format that I shall seek to relate changes

in the nature of the state.

The role of the military in the state- and nation-building process

is not to be taken as identical with the role of coercion. If it were, we

should be engaged in an endless and highly subjective enterprise, for

we should be trying to establish what role coercion played as against

the other factors—commercial, ethnic, linguistic, legal, cultural, and

so forth——that have gone into the making of states. Only minds like

those of Marx and Engels, obsessively concerned with conflict could

so continuously harp upon the role of armed force as the sole force
creating and maintaining the state.

Nor is the role of the military in state— and nation-building to be

equated with the role of warfare. Warfare Would at once embrace

too much and too little. War embraces elements with which I do not

propose to deal—~diplomacy, international relations, the effects of

foreign occupation, the tolls of pestilence and famine, and the like.

Obviously, the format of the armed forces and the resources they

require from their host community will significantly alter if they are

at war, and this will be an object of my concern. But it will be the in—

[89]MILITARY FORCES AND STATE-MAKING

fluence of armed forces in time of war and not war itself with which

I shall be concerned. Likewise the equation of the role of the mili-

tary on state- and nation-building with the role of war would be too

narrow, the military format has a domestic role in time of peace.

My purpose is to follow Aristotle and inquire into the relationship

between the development of modern states and nations and what I

have called the format of the armed forces. In its narrow and most

explicit definition, format merely signifies the service basis of the

forces, i.e., whether they were native or foreign, paid or unpaid, ad

hoc or permanent. In its more extended definition, I include within

the concept, the size of the armed forces, the varying composition of

its main arms (navy against land forces or artillery components

against infantry or_ cavalry and the like), and I equally include the

social stratification of the force. Where necessary, I shall indicate in

the text Whether I am using the more or the less extended definition

of format. On the whole, however, the context will make it clear.

Just as the state has evolved through time, so have the military

formats. At any fixed point of time, both have exerted a reciprocal

influence on each other. To ascertain the nature of this influence is

the object of this essay.

M et/zodolo gy

This relationship between military format and state-building in-

volves a host of intervening variables as coextensive as the entire

field of history itself; which is to say, as coextensive as What Marx

very justly defined as “the study of society in motion.” At various

points of time, we find that we have to explain or understand a de-

velopment in either of our two key variables by such matters as so-

cial stratification, or the condition of the economy, of popular or elite

beliefs, or of the role of the ruler (i.e., his ambitions, and his percep-

tions of risk and opportunity at home as well as abroad).

Some of these variables are more prominent or occur more fre-

quently than others. Additionally some tend to cohere in character—

istic clusters, or to speak more precisely, in cycles of mutual interac-

tion. These clusters themselves interact with other characteristic

clusters. It will save an infinity of time to identify and then name

such clusters, and, in particular, six of the most prominent.

This procedure will not in itself explain the data. To put it at its

lowest, it will prove a convenient shorthand, where the name of each

cluster will resemble a Wagnerian leitmoti'v, signifying, according

[90]SAMUEL E. FINER

to its nature, the entire history of the Volsung family, for instance,

or the birth and death of Siegfried. It should prove capable of some-

thing more than this though: each “cycle” is, in fact, a paradigm, just

as the interrelations of these paradigms in Figure 2-2 are a master-

paradigm. The paradigm, Etzioni says,

is more than a perspective but less than a theory. It provides a

set of interrelated questions, but no account of validated propo-

sitions. It provides a “language,” a net of variables, but it does

not specify the relationships among those variables. It is less

vague than a perspective, providing a systematic, specific, and

often logically exhaustive set of foci for research and specula-

tion. A paradigm is often a stage on the way from an old per-

spective to a new theory. . . . The test of a paradigm is not only

that of the validity of the theories constructed through their ap-

plication, but also its fruitfulness in terms of the spectrum of

significant problems whose study is facilitated by it (Etzioni,

1965: 2).

ECONOMY-TECHNOLOGY-FORMAT CYCLE

(BRIEFLY: ECONOMY-TECHNOLOGY CYCLE)

Socio/Economic Structure

Technology 8: Skills Social Stratification

Armaments A Military Formats

\/

\/

\\ ’/

\ \ \- Threat/Opportunity ” /

Figure 2—2. The Economy-Technology-Format Cycle

In terms of this “cycle,” one can rapidly describe the various fac-

tors responsible, for instance, for the introduction of shock-infantry

into Europe and the decline of shock-cavalry. The Swiss pike-

phalanx outdid the heavy armored shock-cavalry in the course of the

fifteenth century. How and why? The French socioeconomic basis

was a highly monetized, relatively wealthy, technologically com-

petent society with a large population of at least fifteen million peo—

ple. Its social stratification was highly unequal as between a warlike

and politically and economically privileged class of nobles, and the

commoners. These two factors were reflected in the military format

[91]MILITARY FORCES AND STATE-MAKING

one of whose main components was still circa 1415 (Agincourt) the

heavy armored cavalry first introduced in Frankish times. When one

reflects that mail armor alone weighed thirty pounds and cost the

equivalent of a small farm, and that plate armor weighed some one

hundred thirty pounds and was correspondingly more expensive,

that a knight required one or two esquires to equip and support him,

and mounts for them as well as a charger and possibly a remount for

himself, one can see that only a society similar to that of France

could have thrown up and supported such a force. It would be like

expecting private individuals nowadays to help form the army by

bringing to the battlefield their own Centurion or Patton tank, or

their own Phantom plane. Switzerland in all these respects was en-

tirely different. It was a league of, for the most part, poverty-strick-

en rural mountain cantons, much overpopulated, with a prefeudal

social structure of free and egalitarian peasants. The terrain made

horses and armor an encumbrance rather than the reverse and in

any case few if any individuals would have been wealthy enough to

support them. Hence these peasants fought with typically peasant

weapons—evolvements from the well-known bill: first the halberd,

then, in order to keep the enemy Austrian cavalry still further off,

longer pikes with four-feet steel heads. The pikes finally reached the

length of eighteen feet. At the same time a special tactic of handling

these had to be developed, if they were to be effective: the ranks had

to be close so as to admit no charging horses into its gaps. So evolved

the typical Swiss phalanx—cheap and plebeian—a square of six

thousand men which could form a hedgehog against attacking cav-

alry and which, faced with enemy infantry, could actually charge it

with all their impetus and weight of six thousand men. This format
proved decisive over the heavy feudal cavalry at Grandison and

Muret. Henceforth infantry, armed with pike and bow and then pike

and shot, became the linchpin of any military force.

THE STRATIFICATION-FORMAT CYCLE

(BRIEFLY: STRATIFICATION CYCLE)

This cycle and its interrelationships can also be illustrated by Fig-

ure 2—2, on which it, too, is located. Moreover, the former example of

the Swiss infantry can also serve here. That example makes clear the

influence upon the typically Swiss format of the egalitarian struc-

ture of its society: an egalitarian social structure, hence an egali-

tarian military format—even to the point of the Swiss electing their

[92]SAMUEL E. FINER

commanders. French social stratification not only perpetuated be—

yond its useful span the employment of heavy armored shock-cav-

alry (just as the aristocratic cult of ye horse mingled horse cavalry

with the tanks in the “Surprise at Cambrai” in 1917), it also made

the French cavalry refuse to fraternize with the commoners in their

army, whether spearmen or crossbowmen. At Crécy the king of

France’s reaction to the disorganization of his Genoese crossbowmen

was to shout to his knights to “kill me these scoundrels for they block

our road.”

THE BELIEFS-FORMAT CYCLE (BRIEFLY: BELIEFS CYCLE)

Social Stratification———————-————Social Beliefs

\/

Military Formats

// \\

/ \\

. /. \ .

Coercxon-Persuasmn ——————————— Extraction

Figure 2—3. The Beliefs-Format Cycle

Once again, the French example cited above can serve to illus—

trate. Just as society was stratified into noble and commoner, just as

the army was similarly stratified, so to the key arm, the shock-

cavalry which itself corresponds to a social class, there corresponded

a distinct set of beliefs—too inchoate perhaps to be called an ideol-

ogy. This was the notion of chivalry. Knighthood, its duties and also

its privileges, incarnated the chivalric ideal. And only knights fought

on horseback. Crossbows and the like were vilaz'n. Furthermore they

threatened the supremacy of the cavalry arm. In this way the chival-

ric ideals, served to perpetuate an already obsolete mode of fighting.

THE FORMAT-OPTIONS CYCLE (BRIEFLY: FORMAT CYCLE)

It is difficult to reconstruct what prudential considerations went

on in the minds of medieval kings in respect to the various options

with which their reigns confronted them. It is much clearer after the

Renaissance when, even if monarchs did not, albeit obscurely, voice

these considerations, publicists and pundits did so on their behalf.

So it is that we find Machiavelli, Bodin, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and

many others calculatedly balancing up the advantages of using one

military format rather than another. Such calculations have con—

tinued pretty naturally down to our own era, not to speak of our

own day, as I note from a recent publication of the London Institute

[93]MILITARY FORCES AND STATE-MAKING

of Strategic Studies entitled “Military Manpower and Political

Purpose.”

The considerations are three. The first is the effectiveness of the

force for the purpose in hand. Such a “purpose” and such “effective-

ness” are the consequences of ultimately subjective appraisals; it can

be subsumed under two headings: the ambitions of the rulers and

the risk-opportunity as they perceive this. Clearly if a force is de-

signed for defense but is likely to run away at the first menacing
shouts of its enemy, there is no point in having it at all. If it is pre-

dictably useless, then why spend money on it? But if it is not predict-

ably useless, or need not be under certain conditions, then the next

consideration is—can such a force, of such a size be afforded? This

is the consideration of its expense.

But there is also a third consideration and this is the one that

Machiavelli dwelt upon. Given such and such a format, would it be

loyal to the ruler? This is the consideration ofloyalty.

Now what was the range of choices from which rulers could

choose according to these three considerations? They are basically

three, and each can exist in either an ad lzoe or permanent form. Fig—

ure 2—4. shows the basic relationships. Foreign paid volunteers, pop-

ularly known as “mercenaries” could be raised ad hoe like Swiss

pikemen in the fifteenth century, or on a permanent footing like the

foreign regiments that had been incorporated into nearly all Euro-

pean standing armies in the eighteenth century. Next reliance could

be put on what today we would call “national service,” but which

admits of many varieties: its basic characteristic is that it is “oblig-

atory.” It may be selective. The word “conscription,” often used for

this kind of service, originally meant merely the common writing

down of eligible names for the purposes of a ballot, only the unlucky

numbers having to serve. This is, in fact, a kind of “selective service”

such as is used in the United States today. In early days, such con—

scription was highly arbitrary and unfair in its incidence. It was “im-

pressment,” in which the weaker, for instance, the unemployed or

homeless, were the first to be made to enroll. Alternatively every-

body with only relatively insignificant exceptions may be deemed

liable, as in Israel today. This is “universal military service.” In the

feudal period knight service was one component of domestic oblig-

atory service and the fyrd or arriére-ban its other, and popular,

component. But these forces were convened and disbanded ad hoc.

The permanent or standing version of this format, Where a contin-

[94]SAMUEL E. FINER

gent serves in the field and is ready to be supported by a huge re-

serve of colleagues who have already served, is the most common

format in the advanced industrial states of today. Its general intro-

duction dates from the French Revolutionary Wars, and, more gen-

erally, from the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870; but

it had been anteceded in Prussia and the northern states in the sev-

enteenth century, and thence some versions of it were used in

France and Savoy. The third format was the domestic paid volun-

teer troop like the late medieval English “companies” or French

finder (in their ad Izoc form), and of course the regular standing

army, typical of the eighteenth century, and still in use in Britain.

In practice few rulers ever used a land or sea force composed of

only one of these three major types. Normally they would use a com—

bination. There was a continuous evolution in the preferred formats

or combinations of formats during the state- and nation-building

period. The main trends will be outlined in the next section “Chro-

nology.” Meanwhile let me point out that the choice of the formats

was always linked with some of the cycles already discussed: effec-

tiveness with the economy-technology cycle for instance, as well as

with the ruler’s perceptions of risk-opportunity; loyalty is linked

with both the stratification and the belief cycles, and with the state-

building cycle itself. And the expense of the armed force is directly

related to one of the most visible and (from the state-building point

of View) important cycles of all, the extraction cycle. Meanwhile

Figure 2—4. below indicates in tabular form, the Format-Options

Cycle.
AD HOC PERMANENT Consideration

Foreign “Mercenaries”

Paid Efficiency

Volunteers

Native Feudal Host Universal

Obligatory Popular Militia Military Expense

Service Service

Native “Bandes” - “Regulars”

Paid Indentured Loyalty

Volunteers Companies

Figure 2-4. The Format-Options Cycle

[95 lMILITARY FORCES AND STATE-MAKING

THE EXTRACTION-COERCION CYCLE (BRIEFLY: EXTRACTION CYCLE)

EXTRACTION —-—-—-—-———-——-———————-COERCION

(Men,

Money,

Materials)

Style-of-Rule

/\

// \

// \\

/\

/\

/\

Military Format ————— Ruler’s Ambitions ————— Socio-Economic Structure

Figure 2—5. The Extraction-Coercion Cycle

Military forces call for men, materials, and, once monetization has

set in, for money,itoo. To extract these has often been very diflicult.
It has become easier and more generally acceptable as the centuries

have rolled on. Where populations proved recalcitrant—and, I may

add, they were on the whole and in most countries quite extraordi-

narily recalcitrant up to the nineteenth century, to a degree that

makes popular American recalcitrance to the Vietnam War look like

a mere gesture—then rulers had only two alternative courses. They

could try to coerce or try to persuade. Now coercion presupposes

something very similar to the instrument for which the coercion is

itself proposed. Troops extract the taxes or the forage or the carts,

and this contribution keeps them in being. More troops—more ex-

traction—more troops: so a cycle of this kind could go on widening

and deepening. This is precisely what happened in Brandenburg-

Prussia from 16 5 3 onward, and in large measure accounts for the

state-building process in that country.

On the other hand, the need for coercion diminishes if, as a result

of persuasions, the people—in the language of Deborah—“willingly

offer themselves.” Religious fervor may provide the incentive some-

times. When the mass hysteria of national sovereignty and national

self-determination gripped entire peoples in the nineteenth century,

it made possible the provision of armies, navies, matériel, and money

on an altogether unprecedented scale—~50 great a scale indeed that

no amount of naked coercion on the part of governments could have

extracted a tithe of it. Clearly, it hardly needs saying, this extractiow

persuasion cycle is linked with the belief: cycle. Beliefs could inspire

populations to sacrifices hitherto undreamt of. Hence, it could, and

indeed it did become, an object of policy on the part of rulers to sub-

stitute beliefs for coercion, and benefits in return for sacrifices, in

[96]SAMUEL E. FINER

order to extract the vast resources needed. This helped forward the

extension of citizenship and welfare services in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries; that is to say that the cycle links up, with not

just the state-building, but with the nation-ém‘ldin g process also.

THE STATE-BUILDING CYCLE

Consolidation of

Territory .._______________._.____ —-—-—-—————-——— Functions

Ambition of Rulers

Military Format ——————————————— Socio—Economic Structure

Style-of-Rule

Diversification of

Figure 2—6. The State-Building Cycle

The relationship betvireen style-of-rule, territorial consolidation,

and the functional diversification processes has already been ex-

plained. But Prussia provides a fairly clear-cut illustration of what

these terms look like in concrete events and how they interrelate.

The ambition of the Great Elector was to maintain his princely ter—

ritories and make the resources of each pay for the defense of the

others. An ambition to become absolute appears unlikely, at the out-

set, at any rate, but this was the style-of-rule that resulted. For, to

realize his ambitions, he required a larger standing army than his

noblemen, who dominated the Estates, were voluntarily prepared

to pay for. Here the extraction-coercion cycle went into operation,

and the Estates were compelled to consent by show of force. The ex-

traction machinery which he established, notably the excise taxation

system in the towns and the apparatus for supplying and quartering

the troops became more or less standardized throughout the diverse

territories. In this process an extractive-cum-military ofificialdom was

set up which went far beyond mere extraction, into expanding the
very sources of wealth, and thus interfering in domestic and eco-

nomic affairs. This led to an expanding and deepening cameralism,

a set of territories with more or less uniform institutions (consolida-

tion) and a very numerous specialized bureaucracy, both civil and

military (differentiation of functions).

When I began to describe these cycles I pointed out that they

themselves interlinked with one another. It is possible to indicate the

more obvious linkages by Figure 2—7.